Stalin: A Biography

5. Ibid., p. 144.

6. RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 275. See M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p. 18.

7. There is an implicit account of Beso’s material woes in Sochineniya, vol. 1, p. 318.

8. Skating and wrestling incidents have also been blamed: see A. Ostrovskii, Kto stoyal za spinoi Stalina, p. 95. But the phaeton is by far the likeliest story.

9. A. Ostrovskii suggests that the accident might have preceded Stalin’s schooling: ibid., p. 99.

10. J. Iremaschwili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens, p. 5.

11. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, pp. 71 and 73.

12. See below, p. 522.

13. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, p. 39.

14. Ibid., p. 82.

15. Ibid., pp. 43–4.

16. Ibid., p. 61.

17. J. Iremaschwili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens, p. 18.

18. V. Kaminskii and I. Vereshchagin, Detsvo i yunost’ vozhdya, p. 48.

19. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, p. 59.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. RGASPI, fond 558, op. 4, d. 61, p. 1.

23. A. Chelidze, ‘Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tovarishcha Stalina’, p. 19.

24. I am not saying that his arithmetical supervision was exercised impartially. On the contrary, he deliberately manipulated official grain output figures in the late 1920s.

25. RGASPI, fond 558, op. 4, d. 61, p. 1.

4. Poet and Rebel

1. Stalin in old age described his early time in Tbilisi to K. Charkviani. I derive this reference from the notes on Charkviani’s memoirs kindly shared with me by Simon Sebag Montefiore: p. 2a. See also Stalin: v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov i dokumentov epokhi, p. 18.

2. Istoricheskie mesta Tbilisi. Putevoditel’ po mestam, svyazannym s zhizn’yu i deyatel’nost’yu I. V. Stalina, pp. 30–1.

3. I am grateful to Peter Strickland for his advice on nineteenth-century European architecture.

4. See M. Agursky, ‘Stalin’s Ecclesiastical Background’, pp. 3–4.

5. Ibid., p. 6.

6. The original Russian was sobachii yazyk, literally translatable as ‘a dog’s language’. In either translation, however, it was very offensive to Georgians.

7. T. Darlington, Education in Russia, p. 286.

8. Ibid., p. 287.

9. N. Zhordaniya, Moya zhizn’, p. 8.

10. T. Darlington, Education in Russia, p. 288.

11. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 17, p. 1.

12. T. Darlington, Education in Russia, p. 286.

13. J. Iremaschwili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens, pp. 16–17.

14. J. Davrichewy, Ah! Ce qu’on rigolait bien, p. 113.

15. N. Zhordaniya, Moya zhizn’, p. 11.

16. Ibid., p. 12.

17. G. Uratadze, Vospominaniya gruzinskogo sotsial-demokrata, pp. 58–9.

18. N. Zhordaniya, Moya zhizn’, pp. 25 and 27. Zhordania had earlier turned down the invitation from Ilya Chavchavadze to edit Iveria: he wanted complete political autonomy.

19. Ibid., pp. 29–30.

20. Istoricheskie mesta Tbilisi, p. 25.

21. Iveria, no. 23 (1895).

22. N. Zhordaniya, Moya zhizn’, p. 31.

23. deda ena (ed. Y. Gogebashvili: 1912 edition).

24. I. Stalin, Stikhi, p. 3. Several biographies of Stalin wrongly assume that the dedicatee was Giorgi Eristava, the poet exiled to the Polish provinces of the Russian Empire in 1832.

25. M. Kun cites archives indicating that the Eristavi poem was recalled as ‘revolutionary’ in content by a fellow seminarist: see Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p. 77.

26. A more plausible version of this story was that the seminarists borrowed the books in the normal fashion for a fee and took it in turns to copy them out by hand: M. Chiaureli’s memoir of a conversation with Stalin in A Fadeer (ed.), Vstrechi s tovarishchem Stalinym, pp. 156–7.

27. Stalin: v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov i dokumentov epokhi, p. 24.

28. J. Iremaschwili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens, p. 20.

29. ‘I. V. Stalin o “Kratkom kurse po istorii VKP(b)”. Stenogramma vystupleniya no soveshchanii propagandistov Moskvy i Leningrada’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 5 (1994), p. 12.

30. See the results in RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, dd. 48 and 665.

31. Y. Gogebashvili, deda ena (1912). The State House-Museum of I. V. Stalin in Gori also holds the 1916 edition in Hall I.

32. Pupils’ records from the Tiflis Seminary for 1898–9: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 53, p. 1.

33. Stalin’s account in 1931, reproduced in Istoricheskie mesta Tbilisi, p. 29.