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

Victims and enemies of Stalin naturally ascribed his vindictiveness, his rage at any slight to his dignity, to his Georgian culture. Stalin’s younger son Vasili yelled, when drunk, “In our family we never forgive an offense.” For Russians and Turks the cliché that no Caucasian can leave an insult unavenged is a self-evident truth. Stalin possessed, however, deeper traits of the Caucasian male: emotions, with the exception of anger and indignation, are in the Caucasus not to be revealed outside the family home. Georgian social life was as ritualized as English Victorian behavior. Such ritualization taught Stalin to act in public and with outsiders in ways that completely belied his real motives and feelings. Likewise, the liberal sexual morals of the revolutionary only overlaid the rigid puritanism of the Caucasian. Stalin studiously annotated his copy of Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family as if he shared the author’s egalitarian views, but privately he insisted, like a Caucasian patriarch, on the subordination of women and children to the adult male.

Two things reminded Stalin’s immediate circle that he was an alien: his Georgian accent (more pronounced in public speaking than in private) and a preference for red wine over vodka. After 1917 he spoke Georgian to his fellow Georgians Orjonikidze and Beria only in a few asides or outbursts. To his elder son, Iakov, who did not speak a word of Russian until he was seventeen years old, Stalin never spoke Georgian. The one Georgian male trait Stalin ostentatiously preserved was the preparation of meat: in the mid-1930s with his own knife Stalin would slaughter a lamb, cut up the meat, and grill kebabs.

After 1917, apart from a very few notes to his mother and marginal scribbles in his books, Stalin wrote exclusively in Russian. Writing Russian, Stalin made typically Georgian mistakes—for instance, he believed that “macaroni” was a singular noun, and in phrases like “put in the coffin” or “crucify on the cross” he would sometimes confuse the accusative and prepositional cases for the noun—but very few. Stalin never lost an intense interest in the Georgian language or Georgian history. We know of his interest from the impassioned scribbles he made in Georgian books, to his arguments with Georgian scholars and party bosses, and his involvement in the great eight-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Georgian Language.

Stalin was a poet in Georgian. True, he stopped composing verse in the language at sixteen, but right into old age he continued to read Georgian and made brutal underlinings and exclamations in red or blue pencil in the margins of his books. He read like a very competent and unforgiving copy editor: he corrected Georgian grammar or style, and questioned obscure words with an angry, “What’s that?” in Russian. He even improved an author’s translation from Greek into Georgian. Where a phrase stung Stalin, he responded in Russian or Georgian. For instance, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, in the afterword to his historical novel Davit Aghmashenebeli ( David the Builder), remarks: “If brought up by the path of historical patriotism, we can make a Napoleon out of any bandit.” Stalin retorts in the margin “Stupidity!” and to Gamsakhurdia’s assertion that “Hegel and Balzac considered the novel to be the highest peak of poetry,” Stalin reacts with “Ha, ha. Nonsense!” ¹⁰

More important, Stalin shared with Georgia’s luminaries, medieval and modern, a messianic view of their country. Obsessed with Georgia’s mythical greatness in prehistory and its real grandeur in the twelfth century, Georgians to this day suspect themselves to be a people chosen to lead humanity. That conviction lay deep in Stalin’s mentality. In the margins of Ivane Javakhishvili’s History of Georgia of 1943 Stalin asks indignantly, “Why does the author fail to mention that Mithridates and the Pontic Empire were a Georgian ruler and a Georgian state?” In the collected writings of Nikolai Marr, a prodigiously learned Scottish-Georgian charlatan who invented a class theory of language and for a time persuaded Stalin of its validity, he approvingly underlined a particularly lunatic passage in The Abkhaz and Abkhazology where Marr asserts that the Russians evolved from the “Japhetic” peoples of the Caucasus, thus making Georgia the ancestral hearth of Russian culture. Stalin never doubted that he was the scion of an elect nation.