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

Stalin modeled himself on fictional characters, too. He was enthralled by the first novelists in Georgian literature. His revolutionary nom de guerre Koba came from a melodramatic tale by Aleksandre Qazbegi, The Parricide. ¹¹ Qazbegi’s Koba is a wild highlander, a chivalrous outlaw; he reunites the unhappy lovers of the story (including the supposedly parricidal heroine) and finally avenges them by shooting the local lords who have, in connivance with the Russian conquerors, brought about their deaths. Koba the avenger is the only character still alive at the end of Qazbegi’s story; his success in outliving both his enemies and his friends made Stalin especially fond of this pseudonym (he had a dozen others) and it remained his nickname among close associates even in the 1930s.

In the summers of the 1890s, when the seminary was on holiday, Stalin did not go home but spent his days near Tbilisi with other seminary students. He and they were fired by sophisticated Georgian students back from the universities of Warsaw, Kharkov, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Each successive generation of Georgian rebels was more radical: Stalin’s adolescence coincided with the Marxism of Mesame Dasi, a loose group that endorsed violent overthrow of the state and disowned nationalism so as to collaborate with all the subject peoples of the Russian empire. Radicalism in Georgia was more widespread, even among merchants and aristocrats, than in Russia. Georgia’s struggle for self-determination made them overlook the differences between parliamentary liberals and revolutionary socialists. Thus the League for Freedom in Georgia embraced constitutional socialists such as Noe Zhordania, who was to lead the Georgian republic of 1917–21, and internationalist Marxists like Pilipe Makharadze, who were Stalin’s first mentors. Tbilisi was still a sleepy provincial city but in 1895 Georgian intellectuals scattered across Russia and Europe by exile or university study established a small group of Marxists there. The scarcity of proletarians (the city was dominated by Armenian traders and Russian administrators) made it less suitable than the Caucasus’s major industrial city Baku or its main port Batumi for preaching socialism.

Stalin as a Thinker

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD vexed Stalin all his life. Around 1926, reading a Russian translation of Anatole France’s Sous la rose, Stalin was most intrigued by the story of Charles Baudelaire visiting Théophile Gautier, examining a grotesque African carved idol and wondering, “Suppose God is really like that!” Stalin exclaims in the margin: “Hah!! Sort that one out!” He seems distressed by France’s comment that, “God is the point of intersection for all human contradictions,” and scrawls: “Reason—feeling, is that really also ?!”

If Stalin lost faith in God, he kept his Calvinist beliefs on sin, the fall, grace, and damnation. He even retained his belief in the supremacy of love. Much has been plundered from Stalin’s library but his copy of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov still exists. The chapters that Stalin underlined most heavily have nothing to do with murdering one’s father or the right of the individual to do what he wants once God is shown to be dead; what held Stalin’s attention was the philosophy of Dostoevsky’s monks. Father Zosima’s musings on the nature of “active love” for one’s fellow human beings are underlined by Stalin: “active love, compared with dreaming love, is a cruel and terrifying business.”¹²

Stalin could accept Anatole France’s declaration that God was dead; as a Dostoevskian superman, Stalin felt he could supplant God with his own self. What distressed him was his own mortality. Reading France on old age, he underlined the remark that some persons would prefer hell to not existing at all. Even as an adolescent, Stalin worried about old age and death. His best (and last) Georgian poem anticipates the lonely impotence of his last years:

Our Ninika has grown old,

His hero’s shoulders have failed him

[ . . . ]

How did this desolate gray hair break an iron strength?

[ . . . ]

But now he can no longer move his knees,

Scythed down by old age,

He lies down, or he dreams, or he tells

His children’s children of the past . . .

In his last years Stalin could conjure up from the mob whenever he wanted the acclaim and gratitude that his romantic poet persona fails to win, but if he recalled this poem in his debilitated senility, it must have seemed a bitter prophesy.¹³