Now Soso moved beyond mere sympathy towards outright rebellion. Just at this time, his uncle Sandala, Keke’s brother, was killed by the police. Stalin never mentioned this but it must have played its part.
Stalin was “like quicksilver,” moving from French novelists to Marx himself: the boys paid five kopecks to borrow Das Kapital for a fortnight.{64} He tried to study German so that he could read Marx and Engels in the original, and English too—he had a copy of The Fight of the English Workers for Liberty. This was the start of a lifelong effort to learn foreign languages, especially German and English.[32]
Stalin and Iremashvili were soon creeping out of the seminary, under cover of darkness, to attend their first meetings with real railway workers at little hovels built into the Holy Mountain. This first spark of conspiracy lit a fire that was never extinguished.
Stalin became bored by the worthy educational discussions of Devdariani’s seminary club: he wanted to push the circle towards more aggressive action. Devdariani resisted, so Stalin launched a campaign against him and started to create his own group.{65}
The two remained friendly enough for him to stay in Devdariani’s village for the Christmas holidays of 1896. Perhaps Stalin, always a master of “dosage” and soon to be a skilful abuser of hospitality, delayed the final rift so that he had somewhere to stay for the holidays. On the way, the boys visited Keke, who lived in a “little hut,” where Devdariani noticed legions of bedbugs.
“It’s my fault, son, that we eat without wine,” said Keke over supper.
“Mine too,” said Stalin.
“I hope the bedbugs let you sleep?” Keke asked Devdariani.
“I didn’t notice any such thing,” lied Devdariani tactfully.
“Oh he felt them all right,” Stalin said to his poor mother. “He was wriggling his legs all night.” Keke noticed how Soso “avoided me, he tried to speak as little as possible.”
On his return to the seminary in 1897, Stalin broke with Devdariani. “Major and not altogether harmless feuds… were usually stirred up by Koba,” says Iremashvili, who remained with Devdariani. “Koba thought it natural to be the leader and never tolerated any criticism. Two parties formed—one for Koba, and one against.” It was a pattern to be repeated throughout his life. He found a tougher mentor, meeting up again with the inspiring Lado Ketskhoveli from Gori, who had been expelled from both the Tiflis and Kiev Seminaries, arrested and now released. Soso respected no one like Lado.
His mentor introduced his younger friend to the fiery black-eyed Silibistro “Silva” Jibladze, the legendary seminarist who had beaten up the rector. Jibladze and an elegant nobleman named Noe Jordania had, with some others, founded a Georgian socialist party, the Third Group (Mesame Dasi), in 1892. Now these Marxists reassembled in Tiflis, taking over the Kvali newspaper and starting to sow revolution among the workers. Jibladze took the teenager to the apartment of Vano Sturua, who recalls that “Jibladze brought an unknown youngster.”
Eager to contribute, Stalin called on the group’s forceful leader, Noe Jordania, just returned from exile, at Kvali, which had published his last poem. Jordania, tall, with “a graceful and handsome face, black beard… and aristocratic habits and demeanour,” patronizingly suggested that Soso should study more. “I’ll think it over,” replied the truculent youth. Now he had an enemy to fight. He wrote a letter criticizing Jordania and Kvali. They refused to publish it, whereupon Stalin insulted the editorial staff for “sitting in there for days without expressing a decent opinion!”
Lado was also frustrated with Jordania’s gentility and it must have been he who introduced Stalin to the mainly Russian workers’ circles that were just starting to mushroom among the many small workshops of Tiflis. They met secretly at the German cemetery, at a little house beside a mill, and near the Arsenal. Stalin suggested they rent a room on Holy Mountain, “where we used to gather twice a week after dinner before call-over. It cost 5 roubles that we took from pocket-money our parents sent.” Stalin started to keep a “handwritten journal in Georgian about their discussions” which was passed from hand to hand among his followers in the seminary.{66}
He was already crossing the line from rebellious schoolboy to a revolutionary who was, for the first time, of interest to the secret police. When another Marxist activist named Sergei Alliluyev, a skilled railway worker and Stalin’s future father-in-law, was arrested, he was interrogated by the Gendarme captain Lavrov, who asked him: “Know any Georgian seminarists?”{67}
The romantic poet was becoming the “convinced fanatic” with a “quasimystical faith” to which he devoted his life and from which he never wavered. But what did he really believe?
Let him explain in his own words. Stalin’s Marxism meant that “the revolutionary proletariat alone is destined by History to liberate mankind and bring the world happiness,” but humanity would undergo great “trial and suffering and change” before it achieved “scientifically proven socialism.” The heart of this providential progress was “the class struggle: Marxism is the masses whose liberation is the catalyst for the freedom of the individual.”
This creed was, says Stalin, “not only a theory of socialism: it’s an entire worldview, a philosophical system”—like a scientifically proven religion—of which these young revolutionaries were part. “I had the feeling,” explained Trotsky, “I was joining a great chain as a tiny link.” Trotsky, like Stalin, believed that “the lasting thing is gained through combat.” Blood, death, conflict were essentiaclass="underline" “Many storms, many torrents of blood,” in Stalin’s own words, would mark “the struggle to end oppression.”
There was one big difference between Stalin and Trotsky then: Stalin was a Georgian. He never lost his pride in Georgia as a nation and a culture. The little nations of the Caucasus all found it hard to embrace real internationalist Marxism because their own repression made them also dream of independence. Young Stalin believed in a blend of Marxism and Georgian nationalism, almost opposed to internationalist Marxism.
Soso, poring over his Marxist texts, was rude and truculent to the priests, but he was not yet in open revolt as other seminarists were, before and after him. His own propaganda later exaggerated the precocity of his becoming a revolutionary, but he was far from the first of his generation to become the real thing. So far he was a schoolboy radical just dipping his toes into revolutionary waters.{68}
7. Battle of the Dormitories: Soso versus Father “Black Spot”
By early 1897, Stalin was at war with the Black Spot. The school journal records that he was caught thirteen times reading banned works and had received nine warnings.
32
These young Marxists would copy out Marx by hand and distribute the manuscripts. When his Gori friend Kote Khakhanashvili came home with some Marx volumes, Stalin borrowed them but then refused to return them: “Why do you need them? They’re being passed through many hands and people are learning from them.” He also purloined a German-language textbook. Yet his English and German studies never led to fluency: even in the early 1930s he was asking his wife, Nadya, to send him an English textbook to study on holiday.