Many of the archives used in this book, for example, were recorded by official Party historians during the period of Stalin’s rise to power, cult of personality and Terror, from the 1920s to the 1950s. Those recorded in the 1930s were presumably collected in Georgia by apparatchiks working under Stalin’s terrifying Transcaucasian First Secretary Lavrenti Beria. Therefore one must be constantly aware that they are recorded under massive pressure to present Stalin in a good light. At all times, one has to be aware of the circumstances and try to penetrate the Bolshevik language to see what the witnesses are really trying to tell us.
Yet those recorded before the Terror in 1937 are often astonishingly frank, tactless or derogatory about Stalin: a derogatory story about Stalin in an official memoir is almost certainly true. Many of the witnesses were so naïve or honest that their memoirs were unusable at the time, or only usable in small sections. Such memoirs were not destroyed but were simply preserved in the archives. Many were edited, then copied and sent to Stalin’s Moscow archive, so there are differences between versions. But the originals usually survived in the local archive.
Many witnesses were interviewed several times, so that we have sometimes three ver sions by the same witness with important differences. Almost always, the first version is the most revealing. Certain witnesses were tactful yet pointed in their criticisms: the Svanidze memoirs, which as far as I know remain mainly unpublished (except for the diaries of Maria Svanidze, Alyosha’s wife, but they cover the 1930s) are amazingly critical of Stalin even though he was already dictator and they themselves were in his inner circle.
A word on the killings of traitors and the bank robberies: Stalin was keen to suppress these details. He sued Yuli Martov in 1918 to stop their publication and continued to suppress them once he was in power. Yet throughout the memoirs, despite official discouragement, we find details of Stalin’s role that confirm the importance of this “black work” in his early life. When he finds a traitor, the memoirs usually state that the traitor was killed without specifying that anyone ordered the killing. But it is clear that the order involved Stalin. The same is true of cases of arson.
Many ordinary folk were unconsciously revealing, particularly Stalin’s girlfriends, who could not be open about their personal connections with the Leader even when they had borne his children.
Many of these tales of childhood, exile, revolutionary battle and bank robberies are, I hope, useful finds for historians. Keke’s memoir is especially telling. One senses that Stalin would have hated the memoir, which, again as far as I know, was not copied to Moscow and has not been published in Russian or English. I guess that Stalin was never informed that it had been set down. But there is also a wealth of other materials that tell us much about young Stalin.
In Georgia, I managed to unearth various unpublished memoirs from private family archives. Again all the usual rules must apply, particularly guarding against the vainglory of those who claim intimacy with the great and famous. But some were written secretly without direct intimidation. In the case of the Minadora Ordzhonikidze Toroshelidze memoirs, she and her husband were arrested in 1937—he was shot, she released—whereupon she cut sixteen pages out of the manuscript.
In Georgia and to a lesser extent Russia, one can still interview rare witnesses: in a Tbilisi old people’s home, I interviewed Mariam Svanidze, a relation of Stalin’s wife Kato, aged 109; I also spoke to other relations such as Ketevan Gelovani, who provided useful memories. Similarly, Stalin’s granddaughter, Galina “Gulia” Djugashvili, supplied helpful pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, as did the daughters of Ordzhonikidze and Litvinov, among others. The most valuable was Guram Ratishvili, the delightful grandson of General Sasha Egnatashvili, who was able at last to fill in the gaps that have appeared in their family story in every Stalin history book (including my own) up to now.
There are also many published memoirs, particularly from the 1920s, which Stalin could not yet control. Thus the memoirs of Kote Tsintsadze, for example, were highly embarrassing. Though they are restrained and circumspect, they did reveal that Stalin ordered killings and bank robberies at a time when he was desperately trying to prove his heroic legitimacy, political and ideological, to succeed Lenin. When he assumed absolute power after 1929, Stalin, together with Beria, managed to pulp many copies of Tsintsadze’s memoirs. Another example is the memoirs of Stalin’s 1917 assistant Pestkovsky: the first rather irreverent version was published in 1922, but when they were republished in 1930 they had been cleansed. The same applies to Yenukidze, Makharadze, Shotman and many others.
But even the official cult literature has its uses. Lakoba’s Smirba book, the collections on the Batumi demonstration and Stalin’s schooldays, and Beria’s “history” book are all works of propaganda, full of lies and exaggerations, but the quotations from the memoirs are accurate though selectively edited. I have tried to cross-check between books and originals.
One has to be just as careful with the anti-Stalin literature of exiles such as Iremashvili, Nikolaevsky, Vulikh, Uratadze, Vereshchak, Arsenidze and many others. Trotsky and Sukhanov are the two that have dominated Western histories of Stalin. They were anti-Stalin, so they were presumed to be right. Now, on closer analysis, one finds often that they contain errors that we can expose and prejudiced guesses that we can discount—but still they remain very useful.
I have been very fortunate to find less well-known exiled sources too, such as Josef Davrichewy, Khariton Chavichvili and David Sagirashvili, all of whom knew Stalin quite well, each leaving prejudiced, sometimes unreliable, but invaluable sources. One senses that these three, though anti-Stalin, tried to be evenhanded. The Okhrana/Gendarme files, some published by the Bolsheviks, some unpublished in archives, and those of the Paris office resting at Stanford, are very valuable but, based as they are on their own dubious surveillance and intelligence, they are often completely wrong.
Some memoirs and biographies have more value than one might expect. John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World is very sympathetic to the Bolshevik legend and knows little of what was happening within the Party, yet it is a superb piece of reportage. So are David Sagirashvili’s diaries. The earliest Stalin biographies are often surprisingly well informed: Boris Souvarine knew many of the players and had access to those witnesses in exile. More surprising is Stalin: Career of a Fanatic by Essad Bey, the first real Stalin biography, used with obvious reservations.
The memoirs of Khrushchev, Molotov, Mikoyan, Yuri Zhdanov (just published) and others are useful—but with reservations.
I have unapologetically used many published works widely and in detail and have tried to be punctilious in attributing the source. But some books are so outstanding that I would like to list them as my basic sources used throughout the book: Alexander Ostrovsky’s Kto stoyal za spinoi Stalina? is the best scholarly work on Stalin’s connections with the Okhrana and big business: it is unlikely to be bettered; Stephen Jones’s Socialism in Georgian Colors is superb, essential reading; Professor Ronald Suny’s masterly essays Journeyman for the Revolution and Beyond Psychohistory; Miklos Kun’s Stalin: An Unknown Portrait overlaps with both my books on Stalin and is an amazing feat of research and understanding; Robert Conquest’s Great Terror and his Stalin: Breaker of Nations are seminal works that still define Stalin today; Boris Ilizarov’s Tainaya zhizn Stalina is full of the author’s remarkable archival discoveries; on Stalin’s poetry, I depend totally on Donald Rayfield’s authoritative criticism and translation; on the secret police, I have used the excellent Jonathan W. Daly’s Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905 and The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906–17; Anna Geifman’s brilliant introduction, Russia under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894–1917, explains the different psychologies of the revolutionary, while her outstanding Thou Shalt Kilclass="underline" Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 was my basic source on terrorism; Robert Service’s recent biographies on Lenin and Stalin are magisterial yet readable; on Baku, Jorg Baberowski’s groundbreaking, important Der Feind ist überalclass="underline" Stalinismus im Kaukasus is the only work that explains the culture of Caucasian violence. On the Revolutions, I used: Abraham Ascher’s admirable 1905; Orlando Figes’s magnificent A People’s Tragedy; Richard Pipes’s many outstanding works including The Russian Revolution, The Degaev Affair and The Unknown Lenin; and Alexander Rabinowitch’s excellent The Bolsheviks Come to Power.