Stalin and His Hangmen (6 page)

The seminary was generous to its wayward student: the marks in Jughashvili’s leaving certificate reflect his exemplary early years. But the seminary fined him seventeen roubles for unreturned library books – all his life Stalin hung on to books he had borrowed – and they demanded 630 roubles – two years’ salary from Stalin’s first employment – to repay his scholarship, since he had dishonoured his undertaking to repay his education by becoming a priest or schoolteacher.

Being Georgian

When in 1937 writers were commissioned to write about Stalin’s childhood some took as their model the childhood of Jesus Christ – a risky but tempting choice. Jesus and Stalin both had an artisan father who very
soon played no role in the family, an austere mother and an abrupt end, at the age of twelve, to any semblance of family life. Such adolescents may show tremendous self-sufficiency to the point of never trusting another human being, as well as intellectual precocity and vehement intolerance of others’ views, but countless thousands of them do not rise to tyrannize the world. The qualities that determined Stalin’s rise – first, a sense, a conviction, of his mission to rule; second, an acute sense of timing; and third, a deep insight into others’ motivation and a hypnotist’s skill in manipulating them – were yet to manifest themselves.

What we know of Stalin’s formative years – a traumatic home life, a brilliant school career, a crippled body, a vigorous intellect – are cliches in the biographies of many men and women. Being a provincial or a member of an ethnic minority is also a virtual prerequisite for any tyrant, but how did being Georgian shape Stalin’s destiny? Being Georgian gave Stalin far more than the provincial’s inferiority complex, the need to prove himself to a metropolitan world. His Georgian heritage was a source of superiority: it justified his adopting an outlook more cruel and ruthless than those humanistic cliches of nineteenth-century Europe which other Russian revolutionaries had to overcome in order to destroy the existing order and impose their own.

In later life, Stalin’s ethnic ties seemed as weak as his family bonds. In 1950 a group of Georgian historians was summoned to the Kremlin to hear Stalin’s pontifications on their work. They were puzzled by Stalin’s use of pronouns: ‘They, the Russians, don’t appreciate… You, the Georgians, have failed to mention…’ If the Russians were ‘they’ and the Georgians ‘you’, then what nationality was ‘I’ or ‘we’? Like many non-Russian Bolsheviks – Jews, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Armenians or Georgians – Stalin had discarded one ethnos without acquiring another: should not citizenship of a socialist society transcend ethnic affiliation? But Stalin remained Georgian more deeply than Feliks Dzierżyński remained Polish, or Leon Trotsky Jewish, and to penetrate his motivations we must ponder his Georgian upbringing and heritage.

Victims and enemies of Stalin naturally ascribed his vindictiveness, his rage at any slight to his dignity, to his Georgian culture. Stalin’s younger son Vasili yelled, when drunk, ‘In our family we never forgive an offence.’ For Russians and Turks the cliché that no Caucasian can leave an insult unavenged is a self-evident truth. Stalin has, however, deeper
traits of the Caucasian male: emotions, with the exception of anger and indignation, are in the Caucasus not to be revealed outside the family home. Georgian social life is as ritualized as English Victorian behaviour. Such ritualization taught Stalin to act in public and with outsiders in ways that completely belied his real motives and feelings. Likewise, the liberal sexual morals of the revolutionary only overlaid the rigid puritanism of the Caucasian. Stalin studiously annotated his copy of Friedrich Engels’s
The Origin of the Family
as if he shared the author’s egalitarian views, but privately he insisted, like a Caucasian patriarch, on the subordination of women and children to the adult male.

Two things reminded Stalin’s immediate circle that he was an alien: his Georgian accent (more pronounced in public speaking than in private) and a preference for red wine over vodka. After 1917 he spoke Georgian to his fellow Georgians Orjonikidze and Beria only in a few asides or outbursts. To his elder son Iakov, who did not speak a word of Russian until he was seventeen years old, Stalin never spoke Georgian. The one Georgian male trait Stalin ostentatiously preserved was the preparation of meat: in the mid-1930s with his own knife Stalin would slaughter a lamb, cut up the meat and grill kebabs.

After 1917, apart from a very few notes to his mother and marginal scribbles in his books, Stalin wrote exclusively in Russian. Writing Russian, Stalin made typically Georgian mistakes – for instance, he believed that ‘macaroni’ was a singular noun, and in phrases like ‘put in the coffin’ or ‘crucify on the cross’ he would sometimes confuse the accusative and prepositional cases for the noun – but very few. Stalin never lost an intense interest in the Georgian language or Georgian history. We know this from the impassioned scribbles he made in Georgian books, from his arguments with Georgian scholars and party bosses, from his involvement in the great eight-volume
Explanatory Dictionary of the Georgian Language.

Stalin was a poet in Georgian. True, he stopped composing verse in the language at sixteen, but right into old age he continued to read Georgian and made brutal underlinings and exclamations in red or blue pencil in the margins of his books. He read like a very competent and unforgiving copy editor: he corrected Georgian grammar or style, he questioned obscure words with an angry ‘What’s that?’ in Russian, he even improved an author’s translation from Greek into Georgian. Where
a phrase stung Stalin, he responded in Russian or Georgian. For instance, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, in the afterword to his historical novel
Davit Aghmashenebeli (David the Builder),
remarks: ‘If brought up by the path of historical patriotism, we can make a Napoleon out of any bandit’. Stalin retorts in the margin ‘Stupidity!’ and to Gamsakhurdia’s assertion that ‘Hegel and Balzac considered the novel to be the highest peak of poetry’ Stalin reacts with ‘Ha, ha. Nonsense!’
¹⁰

More important, Stalin shared with Georgia’s luminaries, medieval and modern, a messianic view of their country. Obsessed with Georgia’s mythical greatness in prehistory and its real grandeur in the twelfth century, Georgians to this day suspect themselves to be a people chosen to lead humanity. That conviction lay deep in Stalin’s mentality. In the margins of Ivane Javakhishvili’s
History of Georgia
of 1943 Stalin asks indignantly, ‘Why does the author fail to mention that Mithridates and the Pontic Empire were a Georgian ruler and a Georgian state?’ In the collected writings of Nikolai Marr, a prodigiously learned Scottish-Georgian charlatan who invented a class theory of language and for a time persuaded Stalin of its validity, he approvingly underlined a particularly lunatic passage in
The Abkhaz and Abkhazology
where Marr asserts that the Russians evolved from the ‘Japhetic’ peoples of the Caucasus, thus making Georgia the ancestral hearth of Russian culture. Stalin never doubted that he was the scion of an elect nation.

In real not mythical terms, Georgia’s turbulent history is a fount of historical and political wisdom. What the seminary taught Stalin of Georgia’s medieval past provided him with strategies for gaining and holding power, and with an ideal of absolute monarchy. The Georgian Bagratid kings of the twelfth century, among them David the Builder, or of the sixteenth, such as Teimuraz I, whether they built empires like David or lost them like Teimuraz, were ruthless autocrats who eliminated all rivals, even those who fought for their cause. (No wonder Stalin annotated so heavily his copy of
David the Builder.)
The stoicism of medieval Georgian kings amounted to psychopathic callousness. They set the needs of the state high above those of their people, even their family. They defended their ideology, Orthodox Christianity, by the most devious ruses including temporary conversion to Islam but, as good Christian kings, they loathed themselves with religious zeal. King David the Builder’s
Songs of Repentance
and King Teimuraz I’s
Passion on the
Death of St Ketevan
(his mother) portray the king-poets as figures sunk in sin, losing their souls to save the kingdom. And in that self-loathing, that deep conviction of man’s spiritual filth, lie the most poisonous aspects of Stalin’s godless, but nevertheless religious, outlook.

Notjust historically but culturally, Georgia illuminates Stalin’s actions. The ideal ruler, for Georgian kings, was a universal genius – a scholar and an artist as well as a strategist. Virtually all the Bagratids, the dynasty that ruled Georgia for nearly a thousand years, were poets. Some were men of serious learning: in the 1570s the exiled King David XI of Kartli wrote one of the greatest handbooks of medieval medicine; in the 1780s Prince Vakhushti was his country’s first and best geographer. Stalin’s obsession with literature and writers, with science and scientists, and his personal jealousies in these fields, mirror Georgian kings such as Teimuraz I, who, like Nero, envied his rivals as much in poetry as in politics. Few dictators since the Italian Renaissance have manipulated the poets among their subjects so assiduously as Stalin.

The six poems that Stalin wrote in Georgian and published when he was a mere sixteen years old are unguarded utterances (a rare thing for Stalin, in speech or in writing) and they shed some light on his personality. Psychiatrists of several schools would be struck by the recurrent symbolism: moonlight is one obsession. One poem concludes: ‘I shall undo my vest and thrust out my chest to the moon, / With outstretched arms I shall revere / The spreader of light upon the earth!’ Another begins: ‘When the luminary full moon / Drifts across the vault of the sky,’ making this an allegory of restored political faith, but concludes with suspicion: ‘I find my soul rejoicing, my heart beats peacefully; / But is this hope genuine / That has been sent to me at these times?’ The solitude of a moon worshipper culminates in mistrust and suspicion.

Another poem depicts a despised and rejected bard:

Wherever the harp was plucked,

The mob set before the outcast

A vessel filled with poison […]

And they said to him: ‘Drink this, o accursed,

This is your appointed lot! We do not want your truth

Nor these heavenly tunes of yours!’

Ingratitude and poison were to loom large in Stalin’s dealings with his rivals and subordinates: he was fearful of being betrayed, even killed, by those who owed most to him, and in pre-emptive strikes he would smite, even literally poison, those who most expected his gratitude and trust. The verbs that the young poet uses show a predilection for violent action – hang, strike, snatch, clutch. Stalin’s lyrics have a strange vertical perspective from ‘moon… glaciers’ through ‘outstretched arms’ to ‘troughs’, which represents the swing from mania to depression. It is no wonder that in later life Stalin discouraged sycophants who commissioned Russian translations of his adolescent poetry, just as he forbade portraits or statues of himself with pockmarks, and dismissed actors who portrayed him with a limp and a Georgian accent.

Stalin modelled himself on fictional characters, too. He was enthralled by the first novelists in Georgian literature. His revolutionary
nom de guerre
Koba came from a melodramatic tale by Aleksandre Qazbegi,
The Parricide.
¹¹
Qazbegi’s Koba is a wild highlander, a chivalrous outlaw; he reunites the unhappy lovers of the story (including the supposedly parricidal heroine) and finally avenges them by shooting the local lords who have, in connivance with the Russian conquerors, brought about their deaths. Koba the avenger is the only character still alive at the end of Qazbegi’s story; his success in outliving both his enemies and his friends made Stalin especially fond of this pseudonym (he had a dozen others) and it remained his nickname among close associates even in the 1930s.

In the summers of the 1890s, when the seminary was on holiday, Stalin did not go home but spent his days near Tbilisi with other seminary students. He and they were fired by sophisticated Georgian students back from the universities of Warsaw, Kharkov, Moscow and St Petersburg. Each successive generation of Georgian rebels was more radical: Stalin’s adolescence coincided with the Marxism of Mesame Dasi, a loose group which endorsed violent overthrow of the state and disowned nationalism so as to collaborate with all the subject peoples of the Russian empire. Radicalism in Georgia was more widespread, even among merchants and aristocrats, than in Russia. Georgia’s struggle for self-determination made them overlook the differences between parliamentary liberals and revolutionary socialists. Thus the League for Freedom in Georgia embraced constitutional socialists such as Noe Zhordania, who was to lead the Georgian republic of 1917-21, and internationalist Marxists like
Pilipe Makharadze, who were Stalin’s first mentors. Tbilisi was still a sleepy provincial city but in 1895 Georgian intellectuals scattered across Russia and Europe by exile or university study established a small group of Marxists there. The scarcity of proletarians (the city was dominated by Armenian traders and Russian administrators) made it less suitable than the Caucasus’s major industrial city Baku or its main port Batumi for preaching socialism.

Stalin as a Thinker