Elisabedashvili, in his village (anything rather than spend time with his mother). The priest hired Stalin as a tutor to get Giorgi ready for the seminary’s entrance examinations. He always had a strong pedagogic instinct, but he was more interested in converting the boy to Marxism. Arriving on the back of a cart perched atop a pile of illegal books, the two made mischief in the countryside, laughing at peasants, whom Stalin “mimicked perfectly.” When they visited an old church, Stalin encouraged his pupil to pull down an old icon, smash it and urinate on it.
“Not afraid of God?” asked Stalin. “Good for you!”
Stalin’s pupil failed his exams. Father Elisabedashvili angrily blamed the tutor. But the boy got in on a second attempt—and later became one of Stalin’s Bolsheviks.{70}
Back at the seminary, Stalin was in constant trouble: in the school journal, the priests recorded that he was rude, “failed to bow” to a teacher and was “confined to the cell for 5 hours.” He declined to cut his hair, growing it rebelliously long. Challenged by the Black Spot, he refused to cut it. He laughed and chatted in prayers, left Vespers early, was late for the Hymn of the Virgin, and pranced out of mass. He must have spent much of his time in the punishment cell. In December 1898, he turned twenty, much too old for boarding-school, and a year older than anyone else (because of time wasted recovering from his accidents). Small wonder he was frustrated.
He had outgrown the seminary. Seminarists were meant to kiss one another, like brothers, thrice whenever they met, but now, embroiled in factional struggles with Devdariani and devoted to Marxism, he distrusted this chivalrous humbug. “Such embracing is merely a mask. I’m not a Pharisee,” he said, refusing to embrace. The obsession with masked traitors never left him.
There were frenzied searches for the atheists’
Soso was losing interest in his studies. By the start of his fifth grade he was twentieth out of twenty-three, scoring mainly 3s where he used to score 5s. He wrote to Rector Serafim blaming his bad studies on illness, but he still had to resit some of his exams.
Meanwhile Black Spot “watched us ever more vigilantly” and the other boys were encouraged to inform on the rebels. But Stalin was get ting more daring and defiant by the week. When he and his allies started reading funny verses from his copybook, the sneaks reported it to Abashidze, who crept up and listened. He burst into the room and grabbed the journal. Stalin tried to snatch it back. Priest and teenager scuffled but the Black Spot won, frog-marching Stalin back to his flat where he “forced these unclean souls to douse their subversive writings” with paraffin. Then he set fire to the papers.
Finally Abashidze intensified his spying on Stalin: “At 9 p.m., the Inspector noticed in the dining-room a group of pupils around Djugashvili who was reading them something. On approach, Djugashvili tried to hide the notes and only after insistence did he reveal he was reading unauthorized books. Signed: D. Abashidze.”
Stalin’s mother heard “the evil talk that he had become a rebel.” Being Keke, she dressed up and took the train to Tiflis to save the day—but for the first time “he got angry with me. He shouted that it wasn’t my business. I said, ‘My son, you’re my only child, don’t kill me—but how will you be able to defeat Emperor Nicholas II? Leave that to those who have brothers and sisters.’” Soso soothed and hugged her, telling her that he was not a rebel. “It was his first lie,” remembers Keke sadly.
She was not the only concerned parent. Stalin was still seeing his ne’er-do-well father, probably unbeknown to Keke.[33] Accompanied by his mother’s cousin Anna Geladze, Stalin visited Beso, who liked to present him with lovingly sewn boots. “I should mention,” adds Anna, “that Soso had liked wearing boots ever since childhood.” The dictator in jackboots was not just a militaristic pose but an unspoken tribute to his father and to the beautiful leather boots he made with his own hands.
Perhaps his maturity had alleviated his fear of Beso, his Marxism softening his intolerance. Beso, now working humbly in a clothing-repair shop, came to “love his child doubly, talking about him all the time,” says Kote Charkviani. “Soso and I used to visit him. He didn’t raise his voice to Soso”—but he did mutter: “I hear he’s now rebelling against Nicholas II. As if he’s ever going to overthrow him!”
The war between the Black Spot and Stalin was hotting up. The seminary journal reports that Stalin declared himself an atheist, stalked out of prayers, chatted in class, was late for tea and refused to doff his hat to monks. He had eleven more warnings.
Their confrontations were increasingly farcical as the boys lost all respect for their inquisitor. Some of Soso’s buddies were chatting in Yerevan Square’s Pushkin Gardens when a boy ran out and reported that Stalin’s footlocker was being raided (again) by Father Abashidze. They sprinted back into the seminary just in time to see the inspector force open Stalin’s trunk and find some forbidden works. Abashidze grabbed them and was triumphantly bearing his prize up the stairs when one of the group, Vaso Kelbakiani, charged and rammed the monk, almost loosening his grip on the books. But Black Spot held on valiantly. The boys jumped on him and knocked the volumes out of his hands. Stalin himself ran up, seized the books and took to his heels. He was banned from visiting town, and Kelbakiani was expelled. Yet ironically Soso’s schoolwork seemed to improve—he received “very good” 4s for most subjects and a 5 for logic. Even now he still enjoyed his history lessons. Indeed he so liked his history teacher, Nikolai Makhatadze, the only seminary teacher he admired, that he later took the trouble to save his life.[34]
Meanwhile, the Black Spot had lost control of Stalin but could not restrain his own obsessive pursuit of this malcontent. They were getting closer to the breaking point. The monk crept up on him and peeked at him reading yet another forbidden book. He then pounced, taking the book from him, but Stalin simply wrenched it out of his hands, to the amazement of the other boys. He then went on reading it. Abashidze was shocked. “Don’t you know who I am?” he shouted.
Stalin rubbed his eyes and said, “I see the Black Spot and nothing else.” He had crossed the line.
The Black Spot must have longed for someone to rid him of this turbulent trainee-priest. It was almost the end of term. Stalin earned a last reprimand on 7 April for not greeting a teacher and the school broke up two days later. He never returned. In May 1899, the journal simply noted, “Expelled… for non-appearance at examinations.” As always with Stalin, things were not quite so simple.{71}
“I was expelled for Marxist propaganda,” Stalin boasted mendaciously later, but the Black Spot may have been investigating something spicier than just horseplay in the chapel or even Marxist meetings in the town.
The boys with more pocket-money than Stalin used to hire rooms on Holy Mountain, purportedly to hold meetings of their liberal reading circle, but being teenage boys and Georgians, who prided themselves on their amours, it is likely there were parties there too, wine—and girls. The priests, especially Inspector Black Spot, also patrolled the town, like English public-school masters, to catch their boys in theatres, taverns or brothels.
When he was not studying, Stalin could drink and flirt too. He may have got into more serious trouble in the holidays in Gori. Was it his love for the Charkviani girl? He never forgot her, talking about her in old age. Years later, he also remembered another girl from Gori, Lisa Akopova. In 1926, he actually tried to find out what had become of her, which suggests they were close. This encouraged her to send him a letter: “I swear that the attention you show us by asking about us makes me very happy… I was always your inseparable friend in fortune and misfortune… If you’ve not forgotten… you were courted by your pretty neighbour Lisa.” This was daring stuff for the 1920s but not half as daring as another letter Stalin received in 1938.
A woman wrote to Stalin about her niece, Praskovia Mikhailovskaya—Pasha, for short—who was allegedly fathered by Stalin himself in 1899. “If you remember your youth, you cannot forget. You certainly remember a small dark-eyed girl named Pasha.” The letter claims that Stalin’s mother had taken an interest in the child, who herself remembered Keke. Pasha’s mother told her that her father “had devoted himself to saving the nation and had been exiled.” Pasha grew up into a “tall svelte dark-eyed Georgian beauty,” became a typist, and got married, but her mother and husband both died, leaving her destitute. She disappeared into 1930s Moscow.
The letter may be the sort of crazed correspondence attracted by politicians, except for the fact that Stalin, who did not keep much in his personal archive, filed the letter. The mention of his mother rings true, for Keke surely would have helped her beloved Soso in a situation that can hardly have been unknown among the young Casanovas of Georgia. Besides, only someone telling the truth—or a lunatic with a death wish—would have dared to write such a letter to Stalin at the height of the Great Terror. Had Stalin no history of abandoned mistresses and children, one
