Jioshvili, smiled and joked valiantly before the admiring crowd. He leaned on the railings of the gallows and, noticed Gorky, “chatted to people who had come to see him die.” The crowd threw stones at the hangman, who was masked and clad completely in scarlet. He placed the condemned on stools and tightened the nooses around their necks. Sandro just twirled his moustache and readjusted the noose. The time had come.
The hangman kicked away the stools. As so often with Tsarist repression, it was inept: Sandro’s rope broke. The crowd gasped. The scarlet hangman replaced him on the stool, placed a new noose round his neck and hanged him again. Tato also took a while to die.
The townsfolk and the schoolboys hurried away. Stalin and his school friends discussed what would happen to the souls of the executed: would they go to hellfire? Stalin settled their doubts. “No,” he said. “They’ve been executed and it would be unjust to punish them again.” The boys thought this made sense. The hanging is often cited as an event that stimulated Stalin’s murderous nature, but all we know is that the boys sympathized with these Georgian outlaws, and disdained their Russian oppressors. If anything, the spectacle helped make Stalin a rebel, not a murderer.{55}
It was time to move on from Gori: Soso was about to graduate from the church school. Keke often sat at the head of his bed at dawn silently admiring her brilliant slumbering child. “My Soso had grown up,” she says, but they still spent much time together. “We’d hardly ever been separated. He was always beside me.” Even when he had been ill, “he used to read sitting next to me. His only other entertainment was walking along the river or up Mount Gorijvari.”
Yet now she realized that to fulfil her dreams she had to let him go even though “he couldn’t survive without me and I without him but his thirst for learning forced him to leave me.” This thirst was indeed something that never left him.[24] Naturally, after the church school, he had to go to the best religious educational establishment in the southern Empire: the Tiflis Seminary. In July 1893, aged fifteen, he passed his exams with flying colours. All his teachers, especially Simon Gogchilidze, recommended him to the seminary—but there was a problem.
“One day Soso came home” to his mother “with tears in his eyes.”
“What’s the matter, son?” asked Keke.
Soso explained that the strike and closure of the seminary in Tiflis, orchestrated partly by his radical friend Lado Ketskhoveli, meant “he could lose a year because there were no new entrants that summer who were not priests’ sons.”
“I comforted my son,” Keke says, “and then I dressed up,” probably in her best headdress, and called on Soso’s teachers and patrons, who promised to help. The singing master offered to take Soso himself and enrol him in teacher-training college. But, for Keke, it had to be the best and it had to be the priesthood: that meant the seminary.
Keke set out for Tiflis with her son. Soso was excited but on the forty-five-mile train ride, he suddenly began to cry.
“Mummy,” sobbed Stalin, “what if, when we arrive in the city, Father finds me and forces me to become a shoemaker? I want to study. I’d rather kill myself than become a cobbler.”
“I kissed him,” reminisces Keke, “and wiped away his tears.”
“Nobody will stop you studying,” she reassured him, “nobody is going to take you away from me.”
Soso was impressed by Tiflis, the “throbbing bustle of the big city,” though both the Djugashvilis were “terrified that Beso would appear,” says Keke. “But we didn’t meet Beso.”
The indomitable Keke rented a room, and searched out her one well-connected relative in the capital, who was the tenant of an even better-connected priest with a resourceful wife.
“Please help this woman,” the relative told the priest’s wife, “and it will be as good a work as building a whole church.”[25] The priest’s wife appealed to more clergymen who spoke to the seminary and won Stalin the right to sit the entrance exam. That was all his mother wanted because “I knew he’d glorify me.” Indeed he did “glorify” her, but the cost for a non-priest’s son boarding at the seminary was 140 roubles a year, a sum Keke had no hope of raising on her own. Davrichewy, surely at Keke’s bidding, persuaded a well-known aristocrat, Princess Baratov, to help too. With Keke frantically pulling strings, Soso applied for a scholarship and was accepted as a half-boarder, which meant he still had to pay a considerable sum—forty roubles a year—and buy the surplice uniform. Keke did not mind: the “happiest mother in the world” returned to Gori and started to sew to raise the money. Egnatashvili and Davrichewy contributed to his fees.
“A month later,” says Keke, “I saw Soso in the uniform of the seminarist and I cried so much out of happiness. I grieved very much too…” Having enrolled around 15 August 1894, Soso entered the seminary boarding-school and the wider world of the capital of the Caucasus.
The lame, pockmarked, web-toed boy, humiliatingly beaten and deserted by his father, adored but beaten some more by his single mother, haunted by bastardy, surviving accident and disease, had overcome the odds.
It is hard to exaggerate what a vital moment this was. Without the seminary, without the mother’s determination, Soso would have missed the classical, if stifling, education that equipped the cobbler’s son to become Lenin’s successor.
“He wrote to me that he would save me from poverty soon,” recalls his mother, the first of a lifetime of dutiful but distant letters from her beloved son. “When he sent me letters, I pressed them to my heart, slept with them and kissed them.”
“Everyone at the school congratulated me,” adds Keke, “but only Simon Gogchilidze looked wistful: ‘The School seems somehow deserted,’ he said.[26] ‘Who’ll sing in the choir now?’”{56}
5. The Poet and the Priesthood
The boy of sixteen from Gori, accustomed to the freedom of fighting in the streets or climbing Gorijvari, now found himself locked for virtually every hour of the day in an institution that more resembled the most repressive nineteenth-century English public-school than a religious academy: the dormitories, the bullying boys, the rife buggery, the cruel sanctimonious teachers and the hours in the detention cells made it a Caucasian version of
Stalin arrived with a group from Gori, including Josef Iremashvili and Peter Kapanadze. These provincial boys, few of them as poor as Soso, found themselves among the “arrogant sons of wealthy parents.[27] We felt like the chosen few,” wrote Iremashvili, because the seminary was “the source of Georgian intellectual life, with its historical grounds in a seemingly perfect civilisation.”
Soso and the other 600 trainee priests lived in a four-storey neoclassical seminary with noble white pillars. On the top floor, he shared a dormitory of twenty or thirty beds. The other floors contained a chapel, classrooms and a refectory. In a day strictly divided by ringing bells, Soso was awoken every morning at 7 a.m., donned his surplice uniform, then proceeded to prayers in chapel followed by tea and classes. The pupil on duty read another prayer. There were lessons until two. At three he had lunch, then an hour and a half off before call-over at five, after which he was banned from going out again. After evening prayers, supper was at eight, followed by more classes then yet more prayers and lights-out at 10 p.m. At weekends the church services were interminable, “three or four hours on the same spot, shifting from one leg to the other, under the tireless penetrating eyes of the monks.” But the boys were allowed out between 3 and 5 p.m.
The Empire’s seminaries were “notorious for the savagery of their customs, medieval pedagoguery, and law of the fist,” comments Trotsky. “All the vices banned by the Holy Scriptures flourished in this hotbed of piety.” This seminary, nicknamed the Stone Sack, was worse than most: “utterly joyless,” reported one pupil. “Droningly boring—we felt we were in prison.”
When Stalin arrived, its twenty-three teachers were led by a lugubrious trinity: the rector, Archimandrite Serafim; his deputy, Inspector Germogen; and, the most hated of all, Father Dmitri, the only Georgian of the three, who had been born Prince David Abashidze. Soon promoted to inspector, this Abashidze was a fat swarthy pedant —“God’s submissive, lowly slave, the Tsar’s servant,” in his own words.
The monks were determined to squeeze any hint of Georgianness out of their proudly Georgian boys. Georgian literature was totally banned, but then so were all Russian authors published since Pushkin, including
