Stalin: A Biography

There was a nationalist edge to Joseph’s poems even though he restrained himself in order to avoid annoying the Tbilisi censor. His images were those of many writers in the oppressed countries of Europe and Asia of that time: mountain, sky, eagle, motherland, songs, dreams and the solitary traveller. The closest he came to disclosing his political orientation was in an untitled work dedicated to ‘the poet and singer of peasant labour, Count Rapael Eristavi’. For Joseph, Eristavi had identified himself with the plight of the poor toilers of the Georgian countryside.²⁴

Not for nothing have the people glorified you,
You will cross the threshold of the ages —
Oh that my country might rise.

Eristavi, born in 1824, was an ethnographer and folklorist as well as poet. His focus on the need for social and economic reform made him an unmistakable opponent of the status quo in the Russian Empire. According to one of Joseph’s fellow seminarists, the poem dedicated to Eristavi was interpreted as revolutionary in content.²⁵ This may be an exaggeration. But Joseph was undeniably offering a work intended to criticise the status quo.

The legend of a rejected Georgian youth was a figment of Stalin’s imagination. He was welcomed by the Georgian cultural elite. As soon as he left Gori, there was no going back except for holidays. Tbilisi offered the promise of realised ambition. His friends, whether they had come from rich or poor backgrounds, felt the same. They had an eagerness to make a mark in the world outside the town of their birth.

Stalin later made out that he and his comrades crept into Chichinadze’s shop and, short of funds, surreptitiously copied out the forbidden texts into their notebooks. Supposedly they did this in relays to relieve the pain to their hands. A less likely situation is hard to imagine in a well-ordered enterprise. (Not that this has stopped biographers from taking the story at its face value.) Chichinadze was on the side of those who opposed the Russian establishment in Tbilisi. When the seminarists came on to his premises, he surely greeted them warmly; and if copying took place, it must have been with his express or implicit permission.²⁶ The spread of ideas was more important to the metropolitan intellectual elite than mere profit. It was a battle the liberals could scarcely help winning. Chichinadze’s shop was a treasure house of the sort of books the youngsters wanted. Joseph Dzhughashvili was fond of Victor Hugo’s The Year Ninety-Three. He was punished for smuggling it into the Seminary; and when in November 1896 an inspection turned up Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, Rector Germogen meted out a ‘lengthy stay’ in the solitary cell.²⁷

According to his friend Iremashvili, the group also got hold of texts by Marx, Darwin, Plekhanov and Lenin.²⁸ Stalin told of this in 1938, claiming that each member paid five kopeks to borrow the first volume of Marx’s Capital for a fortnight.²⁹ Much as they liked Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, they were not in intellectual thrall to them. Some works by Marx and his followers were legally published in the Russian Empire. Others were passed secretly from hand to hand. The Orthodox Church had lost the contest to retain the loyalty of its livelier seminarists in the Georgian capital. The true struggle was among the various political and cultural trends outside the Seminary. Chavchavadze, a conservative reformer, hoped for a revival of national culture; Tsereteli, a radical liberal, aimed at basic socio-economic reform. By the 1890s, though, they were having to compete with advocates of diverse strands of socialism. Marxism was on the rise in Georgia and Joseph Dzhughashvili was already becoming attracted to its tenets.