Young Stalin

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. Two inspectors were deployed fulltime in “constant unremitting supervision.” Punishments and bad marks were all recorded in the school journal. Soon being sent down—the “wolf’s ticket”— became a badge of honour.

Father Abashidze ran a circle of sneaks among the boys and spent much of Stalin’s schooldays creeping on tiptoe around the seminary or conducting melodramatic dormitory raids in order to catch the boys reading forbidden books, abusing themselves or uttering naughty words. Stalin, who was an acute coiner of nicknames, soon dubbed this grotesque priest “the Black Spot.” Initially terrifying, this man was ultimately comical in a way only the craziest pedagogic sticklers can be.

Stalin had heard all about the famous seminary rebellions from his mentor, Lado. A few years earlier, in 1885, a pupil had beaten up the rector for saying “Georgian was a dogs’ language.” The next year, the rector was murdered with a Georgian khanjali sword—a fate that even the most brutal English headmaster had managed to avoid.

The seminary was to pull off the singular achievement of supplying the Russian Revolution with some of its most ruthless radicals. “No secular school,” wrote another seminarist, Stalin’s comrade Philip Makharadze, “produced as many atheists as the Tiflis Seminary.” The Stone Sack literally became a boarding-school for revolutionaries.

Stalin was initially “calm, attentive, modest and bashful,” remembers one schoolmate, while another noticed the once swaggering Goreli gang leader turn “pensive and secluded, the love of games and fun of childhood gone.” The moody teenage Soso was taking stock—and becoming a self-conscious romantic poet—but he was also studying seriously, passing his first grade with an “excellent” mark and coming eighth out of the whole year. In 1894–95, he won straight 5s (A grades) for Georgian singing and language and scores like 4,5,4,5 in scripture. He was a model student, earning an “excellent 5” for behaviour.

As a scholarship boy in “pitiful” circumstances, Soso constantly had to beg the rector “on my knees” for further help with the fees.[28] Stalin earned more pocket-money (five roubles, he recalled later) by singing in the choir. He was “the first tenor of the right wing of the choir”—the key choirboy— and often performed in the Opera House.

Keke accompanied him to Tiflis and stayed for a few weeks to help him settle. She took a job sewing and serving food at the seminary—surely an embarrassment to Stalin, and perhaps another reason for his initial reticence. Mission accomplished, she returned to Gori. Henceforth, throughout his periods of exile, up until her death forty years on, Stalin wrote to her with dutiful regularity (especially when he needed money or clothes) but with growing detachment. He would never really return to the mother whose remarkable drive and sharp tongue he had himself inherited, yet whom he found unbearable.^{57}

Somehow Beso, lurking in Tiflis, discovered Soso as a potential source of wine-money: he went to see Stalin’s rector and demand his son back: “Make him leave because I need someone to take care of me!” Stalin was “unmoved,” wanting to alleviate “the hardship of Beso and people like him,” but repelled by the man himself.

“Once,” recalled Stalin, “the nightwatchmen came in and told me that my father was outside.” The boy hurried downstairs and “saw him standing there. He didn’t even ask about me but just said briskly: ‘Young man, sir, you’ve totally forgotten your father, haven’t you? I’m leaving to work in another town.’”

“How would I have any money to help you?” replied Stalin.

“Shut up!” shouted Beso. “Give me at least 3 roubles and don’t be as mean as your mother!”

“Don’t yell!” replied Soso. “This is my boarding-school. If you don’t leave now, I’ll call the watchmen and they’ll make you go.”

The “threat worked,” recounted Stalin. “Father slunk away into the streets, muttering something.”^{58}

In the holidays, Soso returned to Gori to see the doting Keke. Even though he “was starting to grow a beard, he still nestled up to me like a five-year-old.” But he spent most of his time staying with his lame, well-off friend Mikha Davitashvili in his village, Tsromi. When he returned for the next term, Stalin did even better, winning another “excellent” and moving up to number five in his year. And he started to work on his verse.

At the end of term, Soso took his poems to the offices of the famous newspaper Iveria (Georgia), where he was received by the country’s greatest poet, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, a romantic nationalist who believed in an agrarian Georgia ruled by an enlightened aristocracy.

The Prince was sufficiently impressed to show the teenager’s work to his editors. He admired Stalin’s verse, choosing five poems to publish—quite an achievement. Prince Chavchavadze called Stalin the “young man with the burning eyes.” He was admired in Georgia as a poet before he was known as a revolutionary.^{59}

6. The “Young Man with the Burning Eyes”

Georgia regarded herself as an oppressed kingdom of knights and poets. The poems in Iveria, published under Stalin’s nickname “Soselo,” were widely read and became minor Georgian classics, appearing in anthologies of the best Georgian poetry before anyone had heard of “Stalin.” Deda Ena, a children’s anthology of Georgian verse, produced between 1912 and the 1960s, included Stalin’s first poem—“Morning” in its 1916 edition. It remained in subsequent editions, sometimes ascribed to Stalin, sometimes not, up to the days of Brezhnev.

Stalin’s singing, now that he was an adolescent tenor, was said to be good enough for him to go professional. As a poet he showed a certain talent in another craft which might have provided an alternative to politics and bloodletting. “One might even find reasons not purely political for regretting Stalin’s switch from poetry to revolution,” believes Professor Donald Rayfield, who translated the poems into English. Their romantic imagery was derivative but their beauty lay in the delicacy and purity of rhythm and language.

The scans and rhymes of his poem “Morning” work perfectly, but it was his sensitive and precocious fusion of Persian, Byzantine and Georgian imagery that won plaudits. “No wonder,” reflects Rayfield, “the doyen of Georgian letters and politics, Ilya Chavchavadze, was willing to print this poem and at least four others.”

Soselo’s next poem, a crazed ode “To the Moon,” reveals more of the poet. A violent, tragically depressed outcast, in a world of glaciers and divine providence, is drawn to the sacred moonlight. In his third poem, Stalin explores the “contrast between violence in man and nature and the gentleness of birds, music and singers.”

The fourth is the most revealing. Stalin imagines a prophet not honoured in his own country, a wandering poet poisoned by his own people. Now seventeen, Stalin already envisions a “paranoiac” world where “great prophets could only expect conspiracy and murder.” If any of Stalin’s poems “contained an avis au lecteur,” writes Rayfield, “it is this one.”

Dedicated to Georgia’s beloved poet[29] Prince Raphael Eristavi, Stalin’s fifth poem was, with “Morning,” his most admired. It was this that inspired Stalin’s State Bank “inside man” to give him the tip-off for the Yerevan Square bank robbery and it was good enough to be included in Prince Eristavi’s jubilee volume in 1899. Its heroic sage requires both the harp and the sickle.

The last poem, “Old Ninika,” which appeared in the socialist weekly Kvali (Plough), affectionately describes an old hero who “dreams or tells his children’s children of the past,” perhaps a vision of an idealized Georgian like old Stalin himself, who ended up sitting on his Black Sea verandah regaling youngsters with his adventures.

Stalin’s early verses explain his obsessional, destructive interest in literature as dictator as well as his reverence for—and jealousy of—brilliant poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak. The words and influence of this “Kremlin crag-dweller” and “peasant-slayer” on literature were, as Mandelstam wrote in his famously scabrous poem denouncing Stalin, “leaden,” his “fat fingers… greasy as maggots.” But, ironically, the swaggering brute rightly notorious for his oafish philistinism concealed a classically educated man of letters with surprising knowledge. Stalin never ceased caring about poetry. Mandelstam was right when he said, “In Russia, poetry is really valued, here they kill for it.”

The ex–romantic poet despised and destroyed modernism but promoted his distorted version of romanticism, Socialist Realism. He knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could