Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

The seminary gave by far the best education in Tbilisi. It was a strange institution where obscurantist Orthodox monk-teachers (mostly Russians appointed by the viceroy of the Caucasus) fought the mainly Georgian liberals among staff and students. Disruption in the seminary was a perennial topic in the Georgian press for the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. In the early 1890s, the heavy hand of Tsar Alexander III’s bureaucracy began to lose its grip. The new generation of students was more radical and the ferment such that one rector, Kersky, was demoted by the government to monkhood, and another, Chudetsky, was murdered by a former student. The writer Iakob Gogebashvili, like many Georgian luminaries a former teacher there, declared that any student, Russian or Georgian, not gripped by egotistical fear would rebel against the seminary authorities.⁷ In 1893, the year before Jughashvili entered, the students’ protests and demonstrations frightened the seminary’s hierarchs to such a degree that tuition was suspended and troublemakers expelled.

Despite antagonism between Russian staff and Georgian students, there were some Russian teachers whom Stalin and his classmates later recalled with respect, even reluctant affection. Some reactionaries on the staff were men of character: the deputy rector in the mid-1890s, Father Germogen, later became bishop of Tobolsk and a member of the Holy Synod. In 1914, he was dismissed for denouncing Grigori Rasputin and in 1918 he tried to rescue Tsar Nicholas II from captivity.

Although he had no clerical background, Jughashvili impressed the seminary enough to be awarded a half-scholarship. The withdrawn, introverted surliness that repelled his fellow students seemed to his teachers the seriousness of a dedicated scholar. It took time for Jughashvili’s religious conformism to collapse under the influence of the radicals in the seminary. Even in 1939, in the USSR, it was admitted in print: “Ioseb in his first years of study was very much a believer, going to all the services, singing in the church choir . . . he not only observed all religious rites but always reminded us to carry them out.”⁸

Stalin’s career at the seminary falls into two periods. Until 1896, when he was seventeen, he was an exemplary student. He acquired the rudiments of classical and modern languages and had begun to read widely in secular Russian and European literature as well as in sacred texts. He had a basic knowledge of world history. His reports show him as fifth in his class with top marks for behavior, Georgian, church singing, mathematics and “very good” for Greek. He rebelled in earnest in 1897, his third year. The previous year, when a crowd had been trampled to death at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in Moscow, Russian public opinion had turned hostile to the new Tsar, his ministers, and the imperial establishment. Jughashvili’s conformism was swept away in this tide of radical anger. His faith collapsed; his term reports became deplorable. By 1898 Jughashvili had fallen to twentieth in the class, he had failed scripture, and was due to retake his annual examinations.

The reading prescribed at Tbilisi seminary was theological, and the lives of the Church fathers were the perfect preparation for reading the classics of Marxism. Ten years of ecclesiastical reading turned Stalin into that chimerical creature: the diehard atheist with a profound knowledge and love of religious texts and music. In his sixties Stalin sought out others who had had a seminary education—Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the opera bass Maksim Mikhailov. To them he remarked, “One thing priests teach you is to understand what people think.”

Stalin’s transition to atheism was neither abrupt nor complete. His atheism was a rebellion against God rather than a disavowal of the deity. The transition from Orthodoxy to Marxism, from the discipline of the Church to that of the party, was easy. Stalin went only halfway. Marxists declare man to be naturally good; all evil stems from social injustice. Stalin knew all human beings to be sinners in need of punishment and expiation. He took with him into power the deeply held conviction that the duty of the ruler was not to make his subjects happy but to prepare their souls for the next world.

At the seminary Stalin’s intellectual interests veered toward forbidden authors and topics. He was now boarding in the same house as the young philosopher Seit Devdariani and illicitly subscribing to the Georgian Society for the Spreading of Literacy, which had a cheap lending library. The cluster of acolytes around Seit and Jughashvili still regarded themselves as trainee priests; the aim that bonded them was to broaden their education through reading political and scientific literature. The books, if found, were confiscated by their teachers, and persistent disobedience of the seminary rules led to imprisonment in a cell on a diet of bread and water.