phaetons knocked down youngsters on the streets. Psychological historians attribute much of Stalin’s development to his drunken father, but this streetfighting culture was just as formative.
Gori, wrote the visiting writer Maxim Gorky, “has a picturesque and original wildness all of its own. The sultry sky, the noisy turbulent waters of the Kura, the mountains in the near distance with their cave city, and farther away the Caucasus with its snows that never melt.”
Gori’s yellow, turreted fortress was probably built by Queen Tamara in the twelfth century. When her empire fragmented, Gori became the capital of one of the Georgian principalities.[16] It was a stop on the route from Central Asia. Camels still passed through on their way to Tiflis, but the opening of the railway to the Black Sea in 1871 downgraded this once proud town into a chaotic provincial backwater with grand connections and a specially riotous tradition. With just one proper street (then Tsar Street, now Stalin Street) and one square, children played, amid ambling oxen, in winding alleys half flooded by open drains. There were just 7,000 Gorelis, half of them Georgians like the Djugashvilis, half of them Armenians, like Kamo’s family: the Armenians provided the entrepreneurs. There were just eighteen Jews. Much more important was Gori’s division into two main neighbourhoods because these were the teams in the town brawls: the Russian Quarter and the Fortress Quarter.
Town brawls, wrestling tournaments and schoolboy gang-warfare were the three Goreli fighting traditions. At festivals, Christmas or Shrovetide before Lent, both quarters fielded a parade led by transvestites or actors riding as “carnival kings” on camels and donkeys, surrounded by pipe players and singers in fancy dress. At the Keenoba carnival to celebrate Georgia’s 1634 victory over Persia, one actor played the Georgian Tsar, another the Persian Shah—who was soon pelted with fruit, then doused in water.
The males in each family, from children upwards, also paraded, drinking wine and singing until night fell, when the real fun began. This “assault of free boxing”—the sport of
Gori’s favourite sport was the wrestling of champions, which resembled somewhat the biblical story of Goliath. It was a great leveller. Tournaments
Those Egnatashvilis were such famed wrestlers they were known through the whole of Kartli, but the first and strongest of them was Yakov.
Prince Amilakhvari had a bodyguard who was a Chechen giant. When he challenged the Gori champions, he beat everyone. So the Gorelis went to Yakov Egnatashvili, who said: “Let him fight my brother Kika; if he beats Kika, let him fight my brother Simon; if he beats him, I’ll fight him.” But Kika beat the Chechen Goliath.
Once some bandits swaggered into town during a religious fete, wearing sheepskin hats and daggers.
They drank at the Egnatashvili tavern, then refused to pay. “We children,” recalled Stalin, watched in amazement as Kika Egnatashvili “smashed one of them, knocked him down, grabbed a dagger from the other’s scabbard and hit that one with the blunt end. The third one paid his bill.”{47}
The church schoolboys joined in the semi-casual bare-knuckle fighting on Gori Cathedral Street. On threat of the detention cell and ultimately expulsion, the schoolboys were absolutely banned from these vicious scrummages, “but Soso still took part.” Besides, his maths and geography teacher, Iluridze, loved to watch his boys in streetfights, yelling, “GO! Go! Well done!” and barely noticing if he was himself hit in the process or spattered with blood.{48}
“Little Stalin boxed and wrestled with a certain success,” agrees Davrichewy.[17] His singing teacher observed him setting up wrestling matches, but once he hurt his already fragile arm. “It started as a wrestling match then turned into real boxing,” recounts the master, “and they beat each other up.” Soso’s arm swelled up painfully and made it harder to fight by the rules.
His friend Iremashvili fought Stalin in the schoolyard. The bout was declared a draw, but as Iremashvili turned away Stalin ambushed him from behind, hurling him onto the grass. When he fearlessly took on stronger fighters, Soso was beaten within an inch of his life and Keke had to rescue him, running to the police chief crying, “My God, they’ve killed my son.” But Stalin remained the most sartorially immaculate street-fighter in his year: “Sometimes his mother even dressed him in a big white collar that, as soon as her back was turned, he would take it off and put in his pocket.”
The boys’ real energies were reserved for gang-warfare. “The kids of our hometown were organized into gangs based on the streets or quarter where they lived. These bands were in constant warfare”—though they were melting-pots too. “Gori’s kids were educated together in the street without distinction of religion, nationality or fortune.” A ragamuffin like Stalin played in the streets with the son of Prince Amilakhvari—a famous general—who tried to teach him to swim. The children, armed with knives, bows and arrows, or catapults, led a blissfully free if wild existence: they swam in the river, they sang their favourite songs, pillaged apples from Prince Amilakhvari’s orchard, mischievously ranging across the countryside. Once Stalin set the Prince’s orchards alight.
“Soso was very naughty,” his younger friend Giorgi Elisabedashvili recalls, “always running through the streets. He loved his catapult and homemade bow. Once a herdsman was bringing his herd home, when Soso jumped out and catapulted a cow in the head. The ox went crazy, the herd stampeded and the herdsman chased Soso who disappeared,” already elusive.[18] “He used to slip through my hands like a fish,” wrote another school friend, “and it was no use trying to catch him.” Soso once terrorized a shopkeeper by igniting some explosive cartridges that destroyed his shop. “His mother had to hear a lot of cursing about her son.”
Soso loved to lead his band on the steep climb up to Gorijvari—the mountain on which the “castle of high yellow walls” stood—where they sang, fought, debated religion and admired the views: “He loved the beauties of nature.” Six miles away, there was Uplis-Tsikhe, the “city of caves,” such a hard climb that initially Stalin failed to reach the top. He practised tirelessly, says Iremashvili, until he could make it.
He was ruthless to other children, but protective of his vassals. When he learned to swim (though he never swam well due to his arm), he pushed a small child who could not swim into the fast Kura waters. The boy protested that he had almost drowned. “Yes, but when you got into trouble, you had to learn to swim,” answered Soso. Yet when his pals were attacked by another gang, Soso “bombarded them with stones until they withdrew.” A friend was being soundly thrashed when Soso appeared and shouted, “Hey, why are you standing there like a donkey? Use your fists!” He beat off the enemy.
Stalin constantly defied lads “older and stronger than himself,” says young Josef Davrichewy. He was already chippy. He was too clumsy to master the Georgian
He displayed the will to power that remained with him until his last days. “Soso belonged to his local gang but he often crossed to the opposing band because he refused to obey his own gangleader,” who grumbled that the boy Stalin “undermined my authority and tried to dethrone me.” Iremashvili thought that “all people who, through greater age or strength, dominated others seemed like his father: he developed a vengeful feeling against everyone positioned above himself.” As soon as he was out of his mother’s control, Stalin, even as a child, had to be the leader.
Somehow, the alternate bullying and crack-up of his father, the passionate adoration of his mother and his own natural intelligence and hauteur, created such a strong conviction that he was always right and must be obeyed that his infectious confidence won him followers. One follower was the son of one of his mother’s Armenian friends—Simon “Senko” Ter-Petrossian, later Kamo. The wealthy father, who had made a fortune supplying the army during Alexander II’s conquests of the Khiva and Bokhara Khanates, angrily asked his daughter “what on earth we saw in that penniless good-for-nothing Stalin. Aren’t there any decent people in Gori?” Not many, it seems.
Soso “could be a good friend as long as one bowed to his dictatorial will,” opines Iremashvili. When a boy
