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

Seit Devdariani was too mild a philosopher for Jughashvili, and in any case was off to Estonia to study at Tartu (Iuriev) University. In 1897 Jughashvili came under the spell of a more charismatic activist, Lado Ketskhoveli, who had just returned to Tbilisi from Kiev University after being expelled for reading forbidden literature. Ketskhoveli managed an underground printshop and was Stalin’s first contact with the world of revolutionary propaganda. Under Ketskhoveli’s tutelage Jughashvili now read exegeses of Marxism, not of the Bible. By 1898 he was engaged outside the seminary in propaganda work among Tbilisi’s largest proletarian group, the Caucasian railway workers. He earned money by coaching a boy for entry to the seminary. That autumn the seminary considered expelling Jughashvili; he suffered reprimands, searches, and detentions, but he was more preoccupied with fomenting a strike of railway engineers in December 1898.

On May 29, 1899, the seminary announced: “I. V. Jughashvili is expelled from the seminary for failing for unknown reasons to appear for examinations.” These “unknown reasons” might have been propagating Marxism, not paying seminary fees after his scholarship was withdrawn, or, as Katerine (who came to take him home) maintained, incipient TB. There may have been another reason. To judge by a semiliterate letter that Stalin hid in his private archive in April 1938 he had become in 1899 the father of a baby girl. All we know of her, apart from her later disappearance, was that she bore an extraordinary resemblance to Stalin, that she was called Pasha (Praskovia Georgievna Mikhailovskaia), and that Stalin’s mother at some point took care of her.⁹

The seminary was generous to its wayward student: the marks in Jughashvili’s leaving certificate reflect his exemplary early years. But the seminary fined him seventeen rubles for unreturned library books—all his life Stalin hung on to books he had borrowed—and they demanded 630 rubles—two years’ salary from Stalin’s first employment—to repay his scholarship, since he had dishonored his undertaking to repay his education by becoming a priest or schoolteacher.

Being Georgian

WHEN IN 1937 writers were commissioned to write about Stalin’s childhood some took as their model the childhood of Jesus Christ—a risky but tempting choice. Jesus and Stalin both had an artisan father who very soon played no role in the family, an austere mother, and an abrupt end, at the age of twelve, to any semblance of family life. Such adolescents may show tremendous self-sufficiency to the point of never trusting another human being, as well as intellectual precocity and vehement intolerance of others’ views, but countless thousands of them do not rise to tyrannize the world. The qualities that determined Stalin’s rise—first, a sense, a conviction, of his mission to rule; second, an acute sense of timing; and third, a deep insight into others’ motivation and a hypnotist’s skill in manipulating them—were yet to manifest themselves.

What we know of Stalin’s formative years—a traumatic home life, a brilliant school career, a crippled body, a vigorous intellect—are clichés in the biographies of many men and women. Being a provincial or a member of an ethnic minority is also a virtual prerequisite for any tyrant, but how did being Georgian shape Stalin’s destiny? Being Georgian gave Stalin far more than the provincial’s inferiority complex, the need to prove himself to a metropolitan world. His Georgian heritage was a source of superiority: it justified his adopting an outlook more cruel and ruthless than those humanistic clichés of nineteenth-century Europe which other Russian revolutionaries had to overcome in order to destroy the existing order and impose their own.

In later life, Stalin’s ethnic ties seemed as weak as his family bonds. In 1950 a group of Georgian historians was summoned to the Kremlin to hear Stalin’s pontifications on their work. They were puzzled by Stalin’s use of pronouns: “They, the Russians, don’t appreciate . . . You, the Georgians, have failed to mention . . . ” If the Russians were “they” and the Georgians “you,” then what nationality was “I” or “we”? Like many non-Russian Bolsheviks—Jews, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, or Georgians—Stalin had discarded one ethnos without acquiring another: should not citizenship of a socialist society transcend ethnic affiliation? But Stalin remained Georgian more deeply than Feliks remained Polish, or Leon Trotsky Jewish, and to penetrate his motivations we must ponder his Georgian upbringing and heritage.