Stalin

Hiroaki Kuromiya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317867791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This profile looks at how Stalin, despite being regarded as intellectually inferior by his rivals, managed to rise to power and rule the largest country in the world, achievieving divine-like status as a dictator.

Through recently uncovered research material and Stalin's archives in Moscow, Kuromiya analyzes how and why Stalin was a rare, even unique, politician who literally lived by politics alone. He analyses how Stalin understood psychology campaigns well and how he used this understanding in his political reign and terror. Kuromiya provides a convincing, concise and up-to-date analysis of Stalin's political life.

Chapter 1

From Georgia to Russia

Soso

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later to be Stalin, was born in Gori, Georgia, an old-established Christian area in the Transcaucasian region of the old Russian Empire, on 6 December 1878 and was christened eleven days later.¹ This simple fact was not widely known until quite recently. According to Soviet official biographies, his birth date was 9 (21 according to the New Calendar adopted after the Russian Revolution of 1917) December 1879. So the Soviet dictator was actually a year older than people had thought. What was the purpose of this misinformation? Stalin is known to have offered different birth dates on different occasions. Perhaps he wanted to present himself as younger than he was: 1879 would have made him nine years younger than Vladimir Ul’ianov (Lenin) and a year younger than his arch-rival Lev Bronshtein (Trotskii). Whatever the reason, this type of minor deception was characteristic of a politician who, as a dictator, would rule the largest country in the world for three decades.

Unlike Lenin, whose father was an intellectually gifted nobleman, Stalin was born into a peasant ‘estate’. His father Vissarion and his mother Ekaterina (Keke) were born serfs. Even after the emancipation of serfs, however, the legal system of estates continued to exist until 1917, hence the Dzhugashvilis belonged legally to the peasant estate. The peasant Vissarion became a cobbler. He prospered for a while, even owning his own workshop and hiring workers, thus qualifying as an ‘exploiter’, as Stalin said later.² By the time Stalin was 10 years old, however, his father had failed in his trade and become an employee in a shoe factory in Tiflis, or Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Very little is known about Vissarion, but it is widely believed that he became a drunkard, beat his only child, and at some point forced Stalin, if only briefly, to leave school to train as a cobbler, like himself. Vissarion left (or was forced to leave) his household while Stalin was still a child, and little is known of him after this. Stalin seems to have had very little to do with him, and rarely spoke of him. Vissarion died a lonely man, probably a vagabond, in Tbilisi in 1909.

His mother, by contrast, is the only person (apart from his two future wives) for whom Stalin is said to have ever felt love. Keke had given birth to two (or three) boys before Stalin, but all of them died in infancy. Stalin himself was weak as an infant and Keke looked after her only child carefully. Many observers have noted her devotion to Stalin. After Vissarion left, Keke, unlike her neighbours, was forced to seek menial jobs such as house cleaning and sewing to support her family. By all accounts, the family was poor. Keke had ‘a strict, decisive character’, and became even more so after Vissarion’s departure.³

Apparently, Keke was not averse to beating her son. In 1935, two years before she died, in what was to be their last meeting, Stalin asked her ‘Why did you beat me so hard?’ She responded, ‘That’s why you turned out so well.’ It is said that she was devout and had dreamed of her son becoming a priest.⁴ In the 1935 meeting, she asked, ‘Joseph [i.e. Iosif] – who exactly are you now?’ She did not understand what her son had become. Stalin answered, ‘Remember the tsar? Well, I’m like a tsar.’ Keke responded, ‘You’d have done better to have become a priest.’⁵ Her reaction amused Stalin. His daughter Svetlana noted that Stalin ‘used to recount this with relish’.

Inevitably, some elements of Stalin’s later personality were already evident in childhood. One of his childhood friends, I. Iremaschwili (who later turned against him politically), recounted how patient and hard-working Soso was (Soso, a diminutive of Iosif, was Stalin’s childhood name). Iremaschwili recalled that, although Soso liked nature, he was incapable of compassion for animals and humans, and attributed this trait to Soso’s having been beaten by his father. Stalin came to entertain a defiant attitude towards his superiors. According to Iremaschwili, from childhood on, Soso was driven by a desire for revenge: ‘To be victorious and be feared was to triumph for him.’⁶ Yet another childhood friend, Joseph Davrichewy, in a more positive anecdote, recounted how Soso was once praised anonymously by a priest in a sermon for being a good Samaritan by helping a woman in the street to carry her heavy packages. Davrichewy soon found out that the Samaritan was Soso, and he and another friend tried to emulate him by helping an old peasant woman carry her bag. Unfortunately, she mistook them for robbers, and Davrichewy was slapped by his father for this ‘chivalry’ inspired by Soso. However, Davrichewy also related, like Iremaschwili, that Soso could not easily accept authority, and he would, for example, disobey and undermine the leader of the gang of children to which he belonged.⁷

In retelling Stalin’s life, many observers have made much of Stalin’s physical characteristics, for example, his height and its impact on his character. In fact he grew to be 170 centimetres (164 centimetres according to some data),⁸ probably taller than Lenin. He also suffered from a variety of minor physical deformities: in childhood he suffered from smallpox, which left his face pockmarked; the second and third toes of his left foot were congenitally joined; his left arm was deformed, probably as a result of being run over by a phaeton in childhood; and his legs were injured permanently by another phaeton accident. Moreover, like many of his contemporaries, he suffered from tuberculosis. Yet he was a relatively strong child, a fierce fighter, according to his childhood friends.⁹ In adulthood, Stalin suffered constant muscular pain and frequent bouts of diarrhoea. He also suffered from neurasthenia (some around him, including doctors, suspected ‘paranoia’).

Although Stalin did not enjoy the reputation of being an intellectual or a theorist in his adult political life (there were indeed more brilliant intellectuals, including Lenin and Trotskii), he was nevertheless bright. His mother was keen on his education. With the support of her employers and patrons (one of whom some people suspect may have been Stalin’s real father, the father of his friend Iosif Davrichewy), Keke had him taught the Russian language (at which he did very well after initial difficulties) and he entered the Gori church school to prepare to become a priest. According to one childhood friend, Soso was devout and his ideal was to become a monk.¹⁰ Interestingly, when he heard the story of Jesus’s crucifixion, Soso demanded to know why Jesus did not take up his sword and why his comrades had not defended him.¹¹ Another incident may have influenced Soso’s psyche in some way. In February 1892, when he was 13 years old, he and his friends witnessed the public executions in Gori of two Ossetian peasants accused of robbery (curiously, the future writer Maksim Gor’kii also happened to be there to witness the executions). One of them had to be hanged twice because the first time the rope snapped. Soso and his friends found it hard to reconcile the executions with the teachings of the church.¹²

Soso proved to be the best student in the class at the Gori school, although Iremaschwili noted that Soso was defiant. In school the use of Russian was compulsory, and pupils were beaten and fined routinely for speaking Georgian. One day the despised school inspector became the object of ridicule by the pupils: he was greeted with whistles and boos. The students were punished for their behaviour, including their ringleader Soso.¹³

In 1894 Soso graduated with distinction from the Gori school. His mother turned down the opportunity for him to study at the Tbilisi normal school at the expense of the state. She wanted him to train as a priest. With the aid of a scholarship and Keke’s patrons, Soso matriculated to the Tbilisi theological seminary, the most prestigious institution in Georgia at that time. Even though it is said that in his Gori years Soso had ceased to believe in God after reading Charles Darwin, in his first year in the Tbilisi seminary Soso appeared to be a good candidate for the priesthood. His penchant for mischief gave way to studiousness; he performed all his duties, including religious services and rites, sang in the church choir, and academically did well (if not brilliantly), eighth out of the 29 students in his class. The seminary students’ lives were regimented according to strict and harsh rules. In particular, their contact with the outside world, including their reading, was severely restricted. According to Stalin’s own account in 1931, it was a ‘humiliating regime’ based on ‘Jesuitical methods’ with surveil-lance and spying. The ‘humiliating regime’ in the seminary fostered discontent and rebellion. As in Gori, the use of the Russian language was enforced rigorously at the seminary. Many of the teachers were politically conservative or even reactionary Russian Orthodox priests. The year before Stalin began his study, the school was forced to shut down for almost nine months owing to student unrest and rebellion. Nevertheless, Soso behaved well, gaining the highest score, a five, in ‘conduct’.

Yet Soso was keenly interested in other subjects. More than likely he had already been exposed in Gori to some literature on the Georgian national revival. He began to read Georgian literature and history intently. In 1895, without the knowledge or permission of the seminary, Soso published patriotic poems under a pseudonym in the Georgian daily Iveriia.¹⁴ One poem ended with

Be full of blossom, O lovely land,

Rejoice, Iberians’ country,¹⁵

And you, O Georgian, by studying

Bring joy to your motherland.

Another proclaimed the victory of the oppressed:

The Lord’s Providence is great …

Know for certain that once

Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man

Strives again to reach the pure mountain,

When exalted by hope.

Yet another echoes this theme:

When the man driven out by his enemy

Again becomes worthy of his oppressed country

And when the sick man, deprived of light,

Again begins to see sun and moon;

Then I, too, oppressed, find the mist of sadness;

Breaks and lifts and instantly recedes

And hopes of the good life

Unfold in my unhappy heart!

These poems suggest that the beginnings of Soso’s political life are to be found in Georgian cultural nationalism.¹⁶ Donald Rayfield, who has analysed the poems, notes that if any of his poems ‘contained an avis au lecteur’, the following one on the ‘opposition of poet–wanderer and the mob’ does. It ends with:

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!’

Rayfield sees in this poem ‘a paranoiac conviction that great prophets could only expect conspiracy and murder: a conviction that is only too obvious in the last twenty years of Stalin’s rule, marked by recurrent poisonings, real and imaginary’. All the same, Soso’s poetic talent was such that Rayfield speculates that had Stalin become a poet, the history of the Soviet Union would have been very different, just as, had Hitler become a painter, the history of twentieth-century Europe would have been very different.¹⁷

Soso’s political life soon evolved from a romantic, literary nationalism into socialism. It is in these years, 1895–6, that social democratic (Marxist) circles began to form in Tbilisi. The Tbilisi seminary was a hotbed of revolutionaries. Soso, with others, organised an underground socialist circle in the seminary around this time. After publishing another poem in 1896, Soso stopped writing poems to engage in politics. In 1898, when the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP) was formed, Soso joined. He was 18 in 1896 and 20 in 1898, contradicting his later account that he began his revolutionary career at the age of 15. By the end of his third year at the seminary (1897) Soso’s academic performance had begun to fail, falling to sixteenth place (with the grade of 3.5 for ‘conduct’) and, by the end of his fourth year (1898), to twentieth place (with the grade of 3 for ‘conduct’).

Unfortunately, little is k...