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

Stalin discouraged prying into his origins and was most evasive about his father; only in 1906 did he give him the most cursory acknowledgment when he briefly adopted a new pseudonym for his journalism: Besoshvili (son of Besarion). Katerine exerted a more prolonged influence on her son. She bequeathed her obstinacy in pursuing goals. Ruined then deserted, constantly moving house, demoted from artisan’s wife to drudge, she nevertheless scraped together the money and cajoled the authorities to get her son off the streets and into school. By several accounts she beat Ioseb as often as Besarion did, but for nobler reasons. Religious piety and instinct told her that education, preferably directed at the priesthood, provided the only way in which her son could make his way in the world. Katerine was nothing if not single-minded; religion and her son were her only interests. Her sole surviving letter to Stalin, from the 1920s, shows how much she had in common with him: “My dear child Ioseb first of all I greet you with great love and wish you a long life and good health together with your good family. Child, I ask nature to give you complete victory and the annihilation of the enemy. . . . Be victorious!”⁵

If Stalin avoided speaking of his father, he was conventionally, if casually, fond of his mother. He sent her short letters and sporadic gifts of money. In the 1930s Katerine could be seen, an austere widow in black, carrying her basket to Tbilisi’s collective-farm market accompanied by a squad of smart NKVD guards—at the fawning initiative of Lavrenti Beria, not at her son’s behest. Stalin visited his mother twice in the 1920s and once in 1935. He just sent a wreath to her funeral.

All who came across Stalin in power were struck by his self-sufficiency and solitude. Perhaps Stalin’s solitary habits came from being the only son of an impoverished and lonely woman, but was his childhood the solitary hell that would produce a psychopath? What we can glean of Ioseb’s childhood does not bear this out. The Jughashvilis lived on amicable terms with their neighbors, who were cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile artisans. Nearby lived Katerine’s extended family— craftsmen and innkeepers, with connections to merchants and even aristocrats. Like Beso’s first two short-lived sons (Mikhail 1875, Giorgi 1876) Ioseb Jughashvili had prominent godfathers on whom the family could also count for support. The young Stalin had for company a foster brother (apprenticed to Besarion) a year younger than himself, Vano Khutsishvili. Vano had no complaints when in 1939 he recalled their apparently happy childhood in a letter to Stalin.⁶ Even after Besarion parted from his wife and son, Katerine and Ioseb kept up contact with that side of the family. Besarion’s sister was married to a Iakob Gveseliani, and although they lived near Tbilisi their offspring, Ioseb’s cousins, often visited Gori. As for Katerine, she and her children were part of an extended family in Gori, including her cousin Mariam Mamulashvili, who had seven children. Not until his twenties could Stalin have known involuntary solitude.

Stalin’s cousins—particularly Pepo (Euphemia) Gveseliani on his father’s side and Vano Mamulashvili on his mother’s side—kept in touch with him until his death. They sent letters—ingratiating, begging, sometimes affectionate. They came to Moscow and on two occasions threatened to commit suicide if Stalin refused to see them. His cousins were the only family category for whom Stalin never sanctioned arrests (Stalin’s in-laws, the Svanidzes and Alliluevs, suffered the same near-extermination as did other “old Bolsheviks”). Admittedly, Stalin did his blood relatives few favors—they endured the same hardships all Georgia’s peasantry and artisans underwent after the revolution—but they were the only human beings with whom Stalin sustained a semblance of normal relations. In his old age he would send them and some schoolmates parcels of cash (his earnings as a Supreme Soviet deputy). In 1951, General Nikolai Vlasik, the commandant at Stalin’s dacha, drew up a list of Stalin’s surviving relatives and schoolmates for a bus trip to a reunion in Georgia. Vlasik would not have dared to do so had Stalin not shown some last flicker of human affection.