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

In real not mythical terms, Georgia’s turbulent history is a font of historical and political wisdom. What the seminary taught Stalin of Georgia’s medieval past provided him with strategies for gaining and holding power, and with an ideal of absolute monarchy. The Georgian Bagratid kings of the twelfth century, among them David the Builder, or of the sixteenth, such as Teimuraz I, whether they built empires like David or lost them like Teimuraz, were ruthless autocrats who eliminated all rivals, even those who fought for their cause. (No wonder Stalin annotated so heavily his copy of David the Builder.) The stoicism of medieval Georgian kings amounted to psychopathic callousness. They set the needs of the state high above those of their people, even those of their families. They defended their ideology, Orthodox Christianity, by the most devious ruses including temporary conversion to Islam but, as good Christian kings, they loathed themselves with religious zeal. King David the Builder’s Songs of Repentance and King Teimuraz I’s Passion on the Death of St. Ketevan (his mother) portray the king-poets as figures sunk in sin, losing their souls to save the kingdom. And in that self-loathing, that deep conviction of man’s spiritual filth, lie the most poisonous aspects of Stalin’s godless, but nevertheless religious, outlook.

Not just historically but culturally, Georgia illuminates Stalin’s actions. The ideal ruler, for Georgian kings, was a universal genius— a scholar and an artist as well as a strategist. Virtually all the Bagratids, the dynasty that ruled Georgia for nearly a thousand years, were poets. Some were men of serious learning: in the 1570s the exiled King David XI of Kartli wrote one of the greatest handbooks of medieval medicine; in the 1780s Prince Vakhushti was his country’s first and best geographer. Stalin’s obsession with literature and writers, with science and scientists, and his personal jealousies in these fields, mirror Georgian kings such as Teimuraz I, who, like Nero, envied his rivals as much in poetry as in politics. Few dictators since the Italian Renaissance have manipulated the poets among their subjects so assiduously as Stalin.

The six poems that Stalin wrote in Georgian and published when he was a mere sixteen years old are unguarded utterances (a rare thing for Stalin, in speech or in writing) and they shed some light on his personality. Psychiatrists of several schools would be struck by the recurrent symbolism: moonlight is one obsession. One poem concludes: “I shall undo my vest and thrust out my chest to the moon, / With outstretched arms I shall revere / The spreader of light upon the earth!” Another begins: “When the luminary full moon / Drifts across the vault of the sky,” making this an allegory of restored political faith, but concludes with suspicion: “I find my soul rejoicing, my heart beats peacefully; / But is this hope genuine / That has been sent to me at these times?” The solitude of a moon worshipper culminates in mistrust and suspicion.

Another poem depicts a despised and rejected bard:

Wherever the harp was plucked,

The mob set before the outcast

A vessel filled with poison [ . . . ]

And they said to him: “Drink this, o accursed,

This is your appointed lot! We do not want your truth

Nor these heavenly tunes of yours!”

Ingratitude and poison were to loom large in Stalin’s dealings with his rivals and subordinates: he was fearful of being betrayed, even killed, by those who owed most to him, and in preemptive strikes he would smite, even literally poison, those who most expected his gratitude and trust. The verbs that the young poet uses show a predilection for violent action—hang, strike, snatch, clutch. Stalin’s lyrics have a strange vertical perspective from “moon . . . glaciers” through “outstretched arms” to “troughs,” which represents the swing from mania to depression. It is no wonder that in later life Stalin discouraged sycophants who commissioned Russian translations of his adolescent poetry, just as he forbade portraits or statues of himself with pockmarks, and dismissed actors who portrayed him with a limp and a Georgian accent.