Stalin and His Hangmen (4 page)

Russian names are presented in a slightly simplified readable version of the standard Anglo-American system; Polish spellings are used for Poles, and Georgian names are transliterated directly from Georgian. Thus we have Dzierżyński, not Dzerzhinsky, Jughashvili not Dzhugashvili. All translations are my own, unless indicated.

I have many people to thank for their assistance: among them Mikhail Voroshilov in the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, Natalia Volkova in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and Rezo Kverenchkhiladze of the Georgian Union of Writers. Staff of Memorial in Moscow, as well as those of the manuscript department of the Russian State Library, and those in the Russian National Library in St Petersburg who compiled the
Leningrad Martyrology
, have been very helpful, as has Memed Jikhashvili of Batum. Olga Makarova, Vika Musvik and other friends located ephemeral periodical material I would otherwise have missed. Boris Ravdin helped me with texts in Latvian, as
well as with certain sources. Anna Pilkington lent me help, linguistic and ideological, with hundreds of bits of text, not to mention an objective critical eye.

ONE
The Long Road to Power

O muse, today sing of Jughashvili, the son of a bitch,
He has artfully combined the donkey’s stubbornness and the fox’s
  cunning,
By cutting a million nooses he has made his way to power.

Pavel Vasiliev
¹

Childhood and Family

Instead of saying something like ‘X was raised by crocodiles in a
septic tank in Kuala Lumpur’, they tell you about a mother, a
father…

Martin Amis,
Koba the Dread

In the Russian empire, especially Georgia, 1878 was not a bad year to bring a child into the world. True, Georgians of all classes seethed with resentment. Their Russian overlords, into whose hands the last Georgian kings had at the beginning of the nineteenth century surrendered their shattered realm, ruled the country through a bureaucracy that was often callous, corrupt and ignorant, while those Georgian children who went to school were instructed in Russian. The Russian viceroy in Tbilisi, however humane and liberal, was determined to keep things as they were: Armenians ran commerce, foreign capitalists controlled industry, while Georgian aristocrats and peasants, upstaged in their own capital city, led a more or less tolerable life in the fertile countryside.

Georgians had some reasons to be grateful for Russian rule. For nearly a century Georgia had been free of the invasions and raids by its neighbours that had devastated and periodically nearly annihilated the nation since the thirteenth century. Russians might impose punitive taxes, Siberian exile and cultural humiliation but, unlike the Turks, they did not decapitate the entire male population of villages and, unlike the Persians, they did not drive away the survivors of massacres to be castrated, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam. Under Russian rule towns had been rebuilt and railways linked the capital to the Black Sea, and thus the outside world. The capital city Tbilisi had newspapers and an opera house (even if it had no university). A new generation of Georgians, forced to become fluent in Russian, realized the dreams of their ancestors: they were now treated as Europeans, they could study in European universities and become doctors, lawyers, diplomats – and revolutionaries. Many Georgians dreamed of regaining independent statehood; so far, few believed that they should work towards this by
violence. Most Georgians in the 1870s grudgingly accepted Russian domination as the price of exchanging their Asiatic history for a European culture.

For the inhabitants of the empire’s metropolis, St Petersburg, 1878 was a year that threatened to totter into anarchy. The terrorists who would kill Tsar Alexander II in 1881 were already tasting blood: the honeymoon between the Russian government and its intellectuals and new professional classes was over. The seeds of revolution found fertile ground not in the impoverished peasantry nor in the slums that housed the cities’ factory workers, but among the frustrated educated children of the gentry and the clergy who were not content to demand just human rights and a constitution. They went further and were plotting the violent overthrow of the Russian state. Such extremism might be fanatical but was not unrealistic. A rigid state is easier to destroy than to reform, and the Russian state was so constructed that a well-placed batch of dynamite or a well-aimed revolver, by eliminating a handful of grand dukes and ministers, could bring it down. The weakness of the Russian empire lay in its impoverished social fabric: the state was held together by a vertical hierarchy, from Tsar to gendarme. In Britain or France society was held together by the warp and weft of institutions – judiciary, legislature, Church, local government. In Russia, where these institutions were only vestigial or embryonic, the fabric was single ply.

The killers of Tsar Alexander II, the generation of Russian revolutionaries that preceded Lenin, saw this weakness but they had no popular support and no prospect of achieving mass rebellion. Russia in the 1880s and 1890s was generally perceived as stagnant, retrograde, even heartless and cynical – but stable. Episodes of famine, epidemics and anti-Jewish pogroms rightly gave Russia a bad international name in the 1880s. The 1860s and 1870s had been a period of reform, hope and, above all, creativity: Fiodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoi and Nikolai Leskov were writing their greatest novels. But the zest was gone: only the music of Piotr Tchaikovsky and the chemistry of Dmitri Mendeleev testified to Russian civilization. Nevertheless, there was tranquillity in stagnation. This was the Russian empire’s longest recorded period of peace. Between Russia’s victory over Turkey in 1877 and its defeat by Japan in 1905 half a human lifetime would elapse.

Around the time Ioseb Jughashvili was born on 6 December 1878 in
the flourishing town of Gori, forty miles west of Tbilisi, the atmosphere among the town’s artisans, merchants and intellectuals was quietly buoyant. A boy whose parents had a modest income could secure an education that would make a gentleman of him anywhere in the Russian empire. Few observers had cause to agree with the prophecies of Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviov: that within forty years a Russian tyranny would be unleashed so violent and bloody that Genghis Khan’s or Nadir Shah’s invasions would pale into insignificance by comparison. Even less did anyone sense that Ioseb Jughashvili, as Joseph Stalin, would be instrumental in establishing this tyranny over the Russian empire and would then take sole control of it.

The family that begot Ioseb (Soso) Jughashvili had no more reason than other Georgians to fear the future. The cobbler Besarion Jughashvili was in 1878 twenty-eight years old, a skilled and successful artisan working for himself; he had been married six years to Katerine (Keke), who was now twenty-two. She was a peasant girl with strong aspirations, well brought up, and had even been taught to read and write, by her grandfather. Their first two sons had died in infancy; this third son, by Georgian (and Russian) tradition, was a gift from God, to be offered back to God. Katerine Meladze’s father had died before she was born, and she was brought up by her uncle, Petre Khomuridze. In the 1850s the Khomur-idzes had been serfs from the village of Mejrokhe near Gori but in 1861 Tsar Alexander II made them, like all serfs, freemen. Petre Khomuridze, once freed, proved an enterprising patriarch: he raised his own child and the children of his widowed sister. Katerine’s brothers Sandro and Gio became a potter and a tile-maker respectively; when Katerine became a cobbler’s wife, all the Meladze siblings had succeeded in rising from peasant to artisan status.

The family of Stalin’s father Besarion seemed to be on the same upward course. Stalin’s paternal great-grandfather, Zaza Jughashvili, had also lived near Gori, in a largely Osetian village.
²
Zaza was also a serf. He took part in an anti-Russian rebellion in the 1800s, escaped retribution and was resettled, thanks to a charitable feudal prince, in a hovel in the windswept and semi-deserted village of Didi Lilo, ten miles north of Tbilisi. Here Zaza’s son Vano moved up the social ladder: he owned a vineyard. Zaza’s two grandchildren Giorgi and Besarion seemed destined
to climb further. After Vano’s death, Giorgi became an innkeeper but their rise to prosperity was brutally interrupted: Stalin’s uncle Giorgi was killed by robbers, and his younger brother Besarion, destitute, left for Tbilisi to be a cobbler. By 1870 the Jughashvilis had resumed their climb: working for an Armenian bootmaker, Besarion acquired not only his craft, but learnt to speak some Russian, Armenian and Azeri Turkish, as well as Georgian. Unlike most Georgian artisans at that time, Besarion was literate.

One in three great dictators, artists or writers before adolescence witness the death, bankruptcy or disabling of their fathers. Stalin, like Napoleon, Dickens, Ibsen, Chekhov, is the son of a man who climbed halfway up the social ladder and then fell off. Why did Besarion Jughashvili fail, when everything seemed to favour a man of his origins and skills? Contemporaries recall little of Besarion. One remembers that the Jughashvilis never had to pawn or sell anything. Another remembers: ‘When Soso’s father Besarion came home, we avoided playing in the room. Besarion was a very odd person. He was of middling height, swarthy, with big black moustaches and long eyebrows, his expression was severe and he walked about looking gloomy.’
³
Whatever the reasons, in 1884, when Stalin was six, Besarion’s affairs went sharply downhill. The family moved house – nine times in ten years. The cobbler’s workshop lost customers; Beso took to drink.

Early in 1890 the marriage of Stalin’s parents broke up. This was the last year the young Stalin had any contact with his father: the twelve-year-old boy was run over by a carriage and his father and mother took him to Tbilisi for an operation. Besarion stayed in the capital, finding work at a shoe factory. When the boy recovered, Besarion gave him an ultimatum: either become an apprentice cobbler in Tbilisi or return to Gori, follow his mother’s ambitions, train to be a priest and be disowned by his father. Soso went back to school in Gori in autumn 1890. Besarion, after visits to Gori to beg Katerina to take him back, vanished. (Stalin later stated in official depositions that his father had abandoned the family.) Besarion Jughashvili became an alcoholic tramp. On 12 August 1909, taken to hospital from a Tbilisi dosshouse, he died of liver cirrhosis. He was buried in an unmarked grave, mourned only by one fellow cobbler.
⁴

Some Georgians found it hard to believe that Stalin could have such
lowly origins: they speculated that Stalin was illegitimate, which would explain Besarion deserting his ‘unfaithful’ wife and her offspring. Legend puts forward two putative fathers for Stalin: Nikolai Przhevalsky, explorer of central Asia, and a Prince Egnatashvili. It is true that Stalin physically resembled Przhevalsky but the latter was a misogynistic homosexual, camped on the Chinese border when Stalin was begotten. In Soviet times two Egnatashvili brothers, related to the priest who married both Stalin and Stalin’s parents and the Prince Egnatashvili for whom Katerina allegedly did housework, led remarkably charmed lives. Stalin was frequently called a bastard and whoreson, but the abuse was figurative. Adultery in a small Georgian town was rare: Keke was a conventional, if strong-willed, wife and mother, and Ioseb was undoubtedly Besarion’s son.

Stalin discouraged prying into his origins and was most evasive about his father; only in 1906 did he give him the most cursory acknowledgement when he briefly adopted a new pseudonym for his journalism: Besoshvili (son of Besarion). Katerine exerted a more prolonged influence on her son. She bequeathed her obstinacy in pursuing goals. Ruined then deserted, constantly moving house, demoted from artisan’s wife to drudge, she nevertheless scraped together the money and cajoled the authorities to get her son off the streets and into school. By several accounts she beat Ioseb as often as Besarion did, but for nobler reasons. Religious piety and instinct told her that education, preferably directed at the priesthood, provided the only way in which her son could make his way in the world. Katerine was nothing if not single-minded; religion and her son were her only interests. Her sole surviving letter to Stalin, from the 1920s, shows how much she had in common with him: ‘My dear child Ioseb first of all I greet you with great love and wish you a long life and good health together with your good family. Child, I ask nature to give you complete victory and the annihilation of the enemy… Bevictorious!’
⁵