outstanding that the church school accepted him into the second grade. “My happiness was endless,” said Keke, but Beso, who could no longer work, “was infuriated.”{38}
Crazy Beso smashed the windows of Egnatashvili’s tavern. When Keke grumbled to Davrichewy, Beso attacked the policeman, stabbing him in the street with a cobbler’s tool. Ironically, Mayor Jourouli presented this as proof that the policeman was Soso’s father. But Davrichewy did not arrest Crazy Beso. According to his son, the police officer’s wound was minor, and he had had some sort of relationship with the “very pretty” Keke: he always “took a special interest in Soso.” Davrichewy merely ordered Beso to leave Gori, whereupon he took a job at the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory in Tiflis where he had started out. Sometimes Beso missed his son and sent Keke money, asking for a reconciliation. Keke agreed occasionally, but it never worked.
Stalin’s father had lost the respect due to him as a man, let alone as a
Keke got a proper job at the atelier of the Kulijanav sisters, who had just opened a lady’s couture shop in Gori. Keke worked there for seventeen years. Now that she earned her own money, she tried to “make sure my child’s heart didn’t wither with sorrow—I gave him everything necessary.”
She brought him up to be the Georgian knight, an ideal he transferred to himself as a knight of the working class. “A strong person,” he wrote to her in her old age, “must always be valiant.” He believed that he resembled Keke more than Beso. Stalin “loved her,” said his daughter, Svetlana, “and he loved to talk about her though she beat him mercilessly. All the love Father had was for me and he told me it was because I looked like his mother.” Yet he began to pull away from Keke.
Stalin “did not love his mother,” claims Beria’s son; others, mainly Georgians, swear he called her “whore.” But these were often stories to dehumanize Stalin told by his enemies. Psychiatrists suggest he was confused by Keke’s combination of virgin and whore, which may have made him suspicious of sexual women later in life.
Was he shocked by Keke’s earthiness? Did he disapprove of her male protectors? Certainly he became prudish later, but so do many people as they get older. All we know for sure is that he was raised in a rigid, hypocritical and macho culture—yet his sexual morals as a young revolutionary were easygoing, almost liberated.
Soso was “devoted to only one person—his mother,” according to Iremashvili, who knew them both well— and is a hostile witness. But the more likely reason for the growing distance between them was her sarcastic outspokenness—she “never hesitated to voice her opinion on everything,” reports Beria’s son—and her domineering drive to control his life. Her love—just as his would be for his own children and friends—was suffocating and severe. Mother and son were rather similar, and there lay the problem.
Yet in his own way he appreciated her intense love. During the Second World War, he laughed fondly about Keke mollycoddling him, telling Marshal Zhukov that she “never let him out of her sight until he was six.”{40}
In late 1888, at the age of ten, Soso triumphantly enrolled at the Gori Church School,[13] a handsome two-storey redbrick building near the new station. Poor as she was, Keke was determined that her Soso would not stand out for his poverty among the well-off sons of priests. On the contrary, he would be positively the best-dressed pupil in the whole school of 150 boys.
So it turned out: many of the schoolboys remembered Stalin’s first day decades later. “I saw among the schoolchildren an unknown boy wearing a long
Stalin’s suffering had made him tough, for all his pretty clothes. “We avoided him out of fear,” says Iremashvili, “but we were interested in him” because there was something peculiarly “unchildish” and “excessively passionate” about him. He was an odd child: when he was happy, “he’d express his satisfaction in the most peculiar way. He’d snap his fingers, yell loudly and jump around on one leg!”[14] Whether written within the oppressive cult of personality when Stalin was dictator or in vicious opposition to him, all memoirs of his childhood agree that Stalin, even aged ten, exerted a singular magnetism.{41}
Somewhere around this time, perhaps just as he started school, he had another close brush with death. “I sent him out to school healthy in the morning,” says Keke, “and they bore him home unconscious in the afternoon.” He had been hit in the street by a phaeton. The boys enjoyed playing “chicken,” grabbing the axles of galloping carriages. Perhaps this was how Stalin was hurt. Once again the poor mother was “mad with fear” but the doctors treated him for free—or Egnatashvili was quietly paying the bills. Keke, her son said later, also called in a village quack who doubled as the local barber.
The accident gave him yet another reason, on top of the webbed foot, pockmarks and rumours of bastardy, for vigilance and inferiority, for being different. It permanently damaged his left arm, which meant he could never be the beau ideal of the Georgian warrior—he later said it prevented him dancing properly, but he still managed to fight.[15] On the other hand it would save him from conscription and probable death in the trenches of the First World War. Yet Keke was worried about how it would affect the future bishop. “When you’re a priest, sonny,” she asked him, “how will you hold the chalice?”
“Never mind, Mummy!” replied Soso. “Before I’m a priest, my arm will heal so that I’ll be able to hold up the whole church!”{42}
Playing chicken was not the only danger in the streets of Gori, which were notoriously out of the control of the Tsarist authorities. Henceforth, even though he would swiftly become the best scholar at his school, young Stalin lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence—choirboy-cum-streetfighter, half—overdressed mummy’s boy, half- urchin.
“There was hardly a day,” says Father Charkviani’s son, Kote, when “someone had not beaten him up, sent him home crying—or when he hadn’t beaten up someone else.”{43} Gori was that sort of town.
3. Brawlers, Wrestlers and Choirboys
Little Stalin now spent his spare time, away from Keke, on the streets of Gori, a liberated and violent place dominated by drinking, prayer and brawling.
Soso had every reason to escape from a home which was always dark and poor. “Day after day, Keke sat at her rickety sewing-machine.” There was nothing but “two wooden couches, a couple of stools, a lamp and a simple table covered in textbooks,” says a frequent visitor, Stalin’s singing-master Simon Gogchilidze. The tiny room was “always clean and tidy” but Stalin’s bed was made of planks: “As he got taller, his mother added a plank to make the bed longer.” But Soso now defied his mother. “If you knew how haughty and proud he is!” she grumbled.{44}
He was a typical Goreli, for the denizen of Gori was notorious throughout Georgia as a
The Russian and Georgian administrators had tried to ban this dubious sport that originated as military training at a time when medieval Georgia was constantly at war. Despite the presence of a Russian barracks, the
