Young Stalin

luck. Father Khakhanov, an Armenian, conducted the ceremony, Father Kasradze recorded the marriage, and Father Christopher Charkviani, a family friend, sang so finely that Yakov Egnatashvili “generously tipped him 10 roubles,” no mean sum. Afterwards, Beso’s friends headed the traditional singing and dancing procession through the streets, playing duduki, long pipes, to the supra, a Georgian feast presided over by a tamada, a joke-telling and wisdom-imparting toastmaster.

The service and singing had been in the unique Georgian language—not Russian because Georgia was only a recent addition to the Romanov Empire. For a thousand years, ruled by scions of the Bagrationi dynasty, the Kingdom of Sakartvelo (Georgia to Westerners, Gruzia to Russians) was an independent Christian bulwark of knightly valour against the Islamic Mongol, Timurid, Ottoman and Persian Empires. Its apogee was the twelfth- century empire of Queen Tamara, made timeless by the national epic, The Knight in the Panther Skin by Rustaveli. Over the centuries, the kingdom splintered into bickering principalities. In 1801 and 1810, the Tsars Paul and Alexander I annexed principalities to their empire. The Russians had only finished the military conquest of the Caucasus with the surrender of Imam Shamyl and his Chechen warriors in 1859 after a thirty-year war—and Adjaria, the last slice of Georgia, was gained in 1878. Even the most aristocratic Georgians, who served at the courts of the Emperor in St. Petersburg or of the viceroy in Tiflis, dreamed of independence. Hence Keke’s pride in following Georgian traditions of manhood and marriage.

Beso, mused Keke, “appeared to be a good family man… He believed in God and always went to church.” The parents of both bride and groom had been serfs of local princes, freed in the 1860s by the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II. Beso’s grandfather Zaza was an Ossetian[7] from the village of Geri, north of Gori.^{21} Zaza, like Stalin, his great- grandson, became a Georgian rebel: in 1804, he joined the uprising of Prince Elizbar Eristavi against Russia. Afterwards, he was settled with other “baptized Ossetians” in the village of Didi-Lilo, nine miles from Tiflis, as a serf of Prince Badur Machabeli. Zaza’s son Vano tended the Prince’s vineyards and had two sons: Giorgi, who was murdered by bandits, and Beso, who got a job in Tiflis in the shoe factory of G. G. Adelkhanov but was headhunted by the Armenian Josef Baramov to make boots for the Russian garrison in Gori.^{22} There young Beso noticed the “fascinating, neatly dressed girl with chestnut hair and beautiful eyes.”

Keke was also new to Gori, daughter of Glakho Geladze, a peasant serf of the local grandee, Prince Amilakhvari. Her father worked as a potter nearby before becoming the gardener for a wealthy Armenian, Zakhar Gambarov, who owned fine gardens at Gambareuli, on Gori’s outskirts. As her father died young, Keke was raised by her mother’s family. She remembered the excitement of moving to unruly Gori: “What a happy journey it was! Gori was festively decorated, crowds of people swelled like the sea. A military parade dazzled our eyes. Music blared. Sazandari [a band of four percussion and wind instruments], and sweet duduki played, and everyone sang.”^{23}

Her young husband was a thin dark figure with black eyebrows and moustaches, always sporting a black Circassian coat, tightly belted, a peaked cap and baggy trousers tucked into high boots. “Unusual, peculiar and morose,” but also “clever and proud,” Beso was able to speak four languages (Georgian, Russian, Turkish and Armenian) and quote the Knight in the Panther Skin.^{24}

The Djugashvilis prospered. Many houses in Gori were so poor they were made of mud and dug out of the earth. But for the wife of the busy cobbler Beso there was no fear of such poverty. “Our family happiness,” declared Keke, “was limitless.”

Beso “left Baramov to open his own workshop,” backed by his friends, especially his patron Egnatashvili, who bought him the “machine-tools.” Keke was soon pregnant. “Many married couples would envy our family happiness.” Indeed, her marriage to the desired Beso still caused jealousy among her contemporaries: “Evil tongues didn’t stop even after the marriage.” It is interesting that Keke stresses this gossip: perhaps someone else had expected to marry Beso. Whether or not Keke stole him from another fiancee, “evil tongues,” later citing the best man Egnatashvili, the priest Charkviani, Gori’s police officer Damian Davrichewy and a host of celebrities and aristocrats, started wagging early in the marriage.

Just over nine months after the wedding, on 14 February 1875, “our happiness was marked by the birth of our son. Yakov Egnatashvili helped us so very much.” Egnatashvili stood godfather and “Beso laid on a grand christening. Beso was almost mad with happiness.” But two months later the little boy, named Mikheil, died. “Our happiness turned to sorrow. Beso started to drink from grief.” Keke fell pregnant again. A second son, Giorgi, was born on 24 December 1876. Again Egnatashvili stood godfather, again unluckily. The baby died of measles on 19 June 1877.

“Our happiness was shattered.” Beso was manic with grief and blamed “the icon of Geri,” the shrine of his home village. The couple had appealed to the icon for the life of their child. Keke’s mother, Melania, started visiting fortune-tellers. Beso kept drinking. The icon of St. George was brought into the house. They climbed the Gorijvari mountain, towering over the town, to pray in the church that stood beside the medieval fortress. Keke fell pregnant for the third time and swore that, if the child survived, she would go on pilgrimage to Geri to thank God for the miracle of St. George. On 6 December 1878, she gave birth to a third son.^{25} [8]

“We sped up the christening so he wouldn’t die unchristened.” Keke cared for him in the poky two-room one-storey cottage that contained little except a samovar, bed, divan, table and kerosene lamp. A small trunk held almost all the family’s belongings. Spiral stairs led down to the musky cellar with three niches, one for Beso’s tools, one for Keke’s sewing-kit and one for the fire. There Keke tended the baby’s cot. The family lived on the basic Georgian fare: lobio beans, badridjani aubergine and thick lavashi bread. Only rarely did they eat mtsvadi, Georgian shashlik.

On 17 December the baby was christened Josef, known as Soso—the boy who would become Stalin. Soso was “weak, fragile, thin,” said his mother. “If there was a bug, he was sure to catch it first.” The second and third toes of his left foot were webbed.

Beso decided not to ask the family’s benefactor Egnatashvili to be godfather. “Yakov’s hand was unlucky,” said Beso, but even if the merchant missed the church formalities, Stalin and his mother always called him “godfather Yakov.”

Keke’s mother reminded Beso that they had sworn to take a pilgrimage to the church at Geri if the baby lived. “Just let the child survive,” answered Beso, “and I’ll crawl to Geri on my knees with the child on my shoulders!” But he delayed it until the child caught another chill which shocked him into prayer: they travelled to Geri, “facing much hardship on the way, donated a sheep, and ordered a thanksgiving service there.” But the Geri priests were conducting an exorcism, holding a little girl over a precipice to drive out evil spirits. Keke’s baby “was horrified and screamed,” and they returned to Gori where little Stalin “shuddered and raved even in his sleep”—but he lived and became his mother’s beloved treasure.

“Keke didn’t have enough milk,” so her son also shared the breasts of the wives of Tsikhatatrishvili (his formal godfather) and Egnatashvili. “At first the baby didn’t accept my mother’s milk,” says Alexander Tsikhatatrishvili, “but gradually he liked it providing he covered his eyes so he couldn’t see my mother.” Sharing the milk of the Egnatashvili children made them “like milk brothers with Soso,” says Galina Djugashvili, Stalin’s granddaughter.

Soso started to speak early. He loved flowers and music, especially when Keke’s brothers Gio and Sandala played the duduki pipes. The Georgians love to sing and Stalin never lost his enjoyment of the haunting Georgian melodies.[9] In later life, he remembered hearing the “Georgian men singing on their way to market.”^{26}

Beso’s little business was flourishing—he took on apprentices and as many as ten employees. One of the apprentices, Dato Gasitashvili, who loved Soso and helped bring him up, recalled Beso’s prosperity: “He lived better than anyone else of our profession. They always had butter in their house.” There were later whispers about this prosperity, embarrassing for a proletarian hero. “I’m not the son of a worker,” Stalin admitted. “My father had a shoe workshop, employing apprentices, an exploiter. We didn’t live badly.” It was during this happy time that Keke became friends with Maria and Arshak Ter-Petrossian, a wealthy Armenian military contractor, whose son Simon would become infamous as the bank robber Kamo.^{27}