Stephen Kotkin - Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928

Others live off our labor; they drink our blood; our oppression quenches their thirst with the tears of our wives, children, and kin.

Leaflets, in Georgian and Armenian, distributed by Iosif Jughashvili, 1902

T IFLIS EXUDED A HAU NTING , magical beauty. Founded in a gorge in the fifth century, the residence of Georgian kings from the sixth, Tiflisits Persian name, also employed in Russianwas centuries older than ancient Kiev, let alone upstart Moscow or St. Petersburg. In Georgian the city was called Tblisi (warm place), perhaps for its fabled hot springs. (I must not omit to mention, enthused one nineteenth-century visitor, that the baths of the city cannot be surpassed even by those of Constantinople.) Still, the Georgiansno more than a quarter of the urban populationwere to an extent upstaged in their own capital.

The urban distribution of power was glaring. On the wide tree-lined Golovin Prospect, named for a Russian general, the shops carried signs in French, German, Persian, and Armenian as well as Russian. Wares on offer included fashions from Paris and silks from Bukhara, useful for marking status, as well as carpets from nearby Iran (Tabriz), which helped distinguish interior spaces. By contrast, over at the citys labyrinthine Armenian and Persian bazaars, underneath the ruins of a Persian fortress, everyone washes, shaves, gets a haircut, dresses and undresses as if at home in their bedroom, explained a Russian-language guide to the warrens of silversmiths and cooking stalls serving kebabs and inexpensive wines.

It was in this modernizing urban milieu that Jughashviliwho was back in Tiflis as of 1894entered the seminary and came of age, becoming not a priest but a Marxist and revolutionary. Lado was the fifth of six children born to a priest from a village just outside Gori. Three years Jughashvilis senior at the Gori church school and then at the Tiflis Theological Seminary, Lado acquired tremendous authority among the seminarians. Under Lados influence, the young Jughashvili, already an energetic autodidact, found a lifelong calling in being an agitator and a teacher, helping the dark masses see the light about social injustice and a purported all-purpose remedy.

GEORGIAN CULTURAL NATIONALIST

Compared with small-town Gori, the Caucasus capital offered a grand drama of incipient modernity, but Iosif Jughashvili did not see much of the city, at least not initially. His immediate world, the theological seminary, was dubbed the Stone Sacka four-story bastion of neoclassical faade. If the main classical gymnasium stood at the pinnacle of the local educational hierarchy, the seminarymore accessible to poor youthwas not far behind. The building, at the southern end of Golovin Prospect on Yerevan Square, had been purchased by the Orthodox Church from a sugar magnate (Constantine Zubalashvili) to serve as the new home of the seminary in 1873. For the hundreds of students who lived on the top floor in an open-style dormitory, their daily regime generally lasted from 7:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. Ringing bells summoned them to morning prayers, followed by tea (breakfast), classes until 2:00 p.m., a midday main meal at 3:00, then a mere hour or so outside the walls, roll call at 5:00, evening prayers, tea (a light supper) at 8:00, homework, and lights out. Day and night we were worked within barrack walls and felt like prisoners, recalled another Gori Soso, Ioseb Iremashvili, who like the young Stalin was attending the seminary by way of the Gori church school. Occasional leaves were granted to return to ones native village or town, but otherwise Sundays alone afforded some free timebut only after Orthodox Church services, which meant standing for three to four hours on stone tiles. Trips to the theater and other blasphemies were proscribed. Some seminarians, however, dared to escape to town after nightly roll call, despite the random night dormitory checks to ferret out reading of illicit materials by candlelight or onanism.

The regimentation for the teenage seminarians accustomed to indulgent families and the free play of the streets had to be frustrating, but the seminary also offered endless opportunity for passionate discussions with fellow students about the meaning of existence and their own futures, as well as the discovery of books and learning. Emphasis fell on sacred texts, of course, and on Church Slavonic and Russian imperial history. Ioseb Soso Jughashvili, now known in Russified form as Iosif, was in his element, and he performed well. He became the school choirs lead tenor, a high-profile achievement, given how much time the boys spent in church and preparing for church. He also developed into a voracious reader who started keeping a notebook of thoughts and ideas. In the classroom, he earned mostly grades of 4 (B), while achieving 5s (As) in ecclesiastical singing, and earned 5 rubles for occasional singing in the Opera House. In the beginning years his only 3s (Cs) came in final composition and Greek. He received the top mark (5) in conduct. As a freshman, Jughashvili placed eighth in a group of twenty-nine, and as a sophomore he rose to fifth. But in his third year, 1896-97, his rank slipped to sixteenth (of twenty-four), and by the fifth year he stood twentieth (of twenty-three), having failed scripture. But the main cause of his declining interest and performance stemmed from a culture clash brought on by modernizing forces and political reactions.

In 1879, the year after Jughashvili had been born, two Georgian noblemen writers, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze (b. 1837) and Prince Akaki Tsereteli (b. 1840), had founded the Society for the Spread of Literacy Among Georgians. Georgians comprised many different groupsKakhetis, Kartlians, Imeretians, Mingrelianswith a shared language, and Chavchavadze and Tsereteli hoped to spark an integrated Georgian cultural rebirth through schools, libraries, and bookshops. Their conservative populist cultural program intended no disloyalty to the empire.

Expulsions for unreliability became commonplace, defeating the educational purpose of the seminary. In response to the heavy-handedness, Tiflis seminariansmany of them the sons of Orthodox priestshad begun (in the 1870s) to produce illegal newsletters and form secret discussion circles. In 1884, a member of one such Tiflis seminary circle, Silibistro Silva Jibladze (who had led a revolt back in his junior seminary), struck the Russian rector in the face for denigrating Georgian as dogspeak. As the boys well knew, the kingdom of Georgia had converted to the Christian faith half a millennium before the Russians did, and more than a century before the Romans. Jibladze was sentenced to three years in a punishment battalion. Then, in 1886, to empirewide notoriety, a different expelled student assassinated the Tiflis seminary rector using a traditional Caucasus dagger (kinjal). The seminary reopened in fall 1894 with two first-year classes, the 1893 and the 1894 admissions, the latter being Iosif Jughashvilis.

When the future Stalin started at the seminary, the harsh disciplinary mechanisms remained, but in a concession, courses in Georgian literature and history were reinstituted. In summer 1895, after his first year, Jughashvili, then sixteen and a half, took his own Georgian-language verses in person to the publishing nobleman Ilya Chavchavadze, without seminary permission. The editor of Chavchavadzes newspaper Iveria (a term for Eastern Georgia) published five of Jughashvilis poems, under the widely used Georgian nickname for Ioseb/Iosif: Soselo. Eristavis verses, the dictator would later say, were beautiful, emotional, and musical, adding that the prince was rightly called the nightingale of Georgiaa role to which Jughashvili himself might have aspired. An affectionate sixth Jughashvili poem, Old Ninika, published in 1896 in