The priest also supported her plan to educate Soso and she asked the Charkvianis to let their teenage sons teach him Russian with their younger children. She sensed that Soso was gifted. The teenage boys were teaching their younger sister, who could not answer their questions—but young Stalin could. Stalin boasted as an old man that he had learned to read and write faster than the older children: he ended up teaching the teenagers. “It had to be top secret,” says Father Charkviani’s son Kote, “because Uncle Beso was getting worse daily, threatening, ‘Don’t ruin my son or else!’ He’d drag Soso by the ear to the workshop, but as soon as his father went out, Soso joined us, we locked the door and studied.” The Davrichewys let him share their son’s lessons too.
Such was the charm of Keke and the horror of Beso that everyone wanted to help her. Now she had to inveigle Soso into Gori’s excellent church school so that he could become a bishop. She made several attempts. But the school was taking only the children of priests. Father Charkviani solved this problem by saying that Soso’s father was a deacon, but this appears in none of the documents. One wonders if he actually whispered to the school authorities that he himself or some other sinful priest was the natural father. Was it this chicanery that made Stalin claim that his father was a priest?
Soso sat the examination—prayers, reading, arithmetic and Russian—and his performance was so outstanding that the church school accepted him into the second grade. “My happiness was endless,” said Keke, but Beso, who could no longer work, “was infuriated.”3
Crazy Beso smashed the windows of Egnatashvili’s tavern. When Keke grumbled to Davrichewy, Beso attacked the policeman, stabbing him in the street with a cobbler’s tool. Ironically, Mayor Jourouli presented this as proof that the policeman was Soso’s father. But Davrichewy did not arrest Crazy Beso. According to his son, the police officer’s wound was minor, and he had had some sort of relationship with the “very pretty” Keke: he always “took a special interest in Soso.” Davrichewy merely ordered Beso to leave Gori, whereupon he took a job at the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory in Tiflis where he had started out. Sometimes Beso missed his son and sent Keke money, asking for a reconciliation. Keke agreed occasionally, but it never worked.
Stalin’s father had lost the respect due to him as a man, let alone as a karachogeli. In the honour-and-shame society of Georgia, this was a sort of death. “He was a half-man now,” said Keke, and this pushed him over the edge. For the moment, he was gone, but he was never far away.4
Keke got a proper job at the atelier of the Kulijanav sisters, who had just opened a lady’s couture shop in Gori. Keke worked there for seventeen years. Now that she earned her own money, she tried to “make sure my child’s heart didn’t wither with sorrow—I gave him everything necessary.”
She brought him up to be the Georgian knight, an ideal he transferred to himself as a knight of the working class. “A strong person,” he wrote to her in her old age, “must always be valiant.” He believed that he resembled Keke more than Beso. Stalin “loved her,” said his daughter, Svetlana, “and he loved to talk about her though she beat him mercilessly. All the love Father had was for me and he told me it was because I looked like his mother.” Yet he began to pull away from Keke.
Stalin “did not love his mother,” claims Beria’s son; others, mainly Georgians, swear he called her “whore.” But these were often stories to dehumanize Stalin told by his enemies. Psychiatrists suggest he was confused by Keke’s combination of virgin and whore, which may have made him suspicious of sexual women later in life.
Was he shocked by Keke’s earthiness? Did he disapprove of her male protectors? Certainly he became prudish later, but so do many people as they get older. All we know for sure is that he was raised in a rigid, hypocritical and macho culture—yet his sexual morals as a young revolutionary were easygoing, almost liberated.
Soso was “devoted to only one person—his mother,” according to Iremashvili, who knew them both well—and is a hostile witness. But the more likely reason for the growing distance between them was her sarcastic outspokenness—she “never hesitated to voice her opinion on everything,” reports Beria’s son—and her domineering drive to control his life. Her love—just as his would be for his own children and friends—was suffocating and severe. Mother and son were rather similar, and there lay the problem.
Yet in his own way he appreciated her intense love. During the Second World War, he laughed fondly about Keke mollycoddling him, telling Marshal Zhukov that she “never let him out of her sight until he was six.”5
In late 1888, at the age of ten, Soso triumphantly enrolled at the Gori Church School,* a handsome two-storey redbrick building near the new station. Poor as she was, Keke was determined that her Soso would not stand out for his poverty among the well-off sons of priests. On the contrary, he would be positively the best-dressed pupil in the whole school of 150 boys.
So it turned out: many of the schoolboys remembered Stalin’s first day decades later. “I saw among the schoolchildren an unknown boy wearing a long arkhalukhi [formal Georgian coat] down to his knees, new boots with high legs, a tight wide leather belt and a black peak-cap with a lacquered visor shining in the sun,” recalled Vano Ketskhoveli, soon a friend. “This very short person, quite thin, was wearing tight trousers and boots and a pleated shirt with a scarf” and a “red chintz schoolbag.” Vano was amazed: “No one else was dressed like that in the whole class, the whole school. Schoolboys surrounded him” in fascination. The poorest boy was outfitted the best, the Fauntleroy of Gori. Who had paid for these beautiful clothes? Priests, tavern owners and police officers had surely played their part.
Stalin’s suffering had made him tough, for all his pretty clothes. “We avoided him out of fear,” says Iremashvili, “but we were interested in him” because there was something peculiarly “unchildish” and “excessively passionate” about him. He was an odd child: when he was happy, “he’d express his satisfaction in the most peculiar way. He’d snap his fingers, yell loudly and jump around on one leg!”* Whether written within the oppressive cult of personality when Stalin was dictator or in vicious opposition to him, all memoirs of his childhood agree that Stalin, even aged ten, exerted a singular magnetism.6
Somewhere around this time, perhaps just as he started school, he had another close brush with death. “I sent him out to school healthy in the morning,” says Keke, “and they bore him home unconscious in the afternoon.” He had been hit in the street by a phaeton. The boys enjoyed playing “chicken,” grabbing the axles of galloping carriages. Perhaps this was how Stalin was hurt. Once again the poor mother was “mad with fear” but the doctors treated him for free—or Egnatashvili was quietly paying the bills. Keke, her son said later, also called in a village quack who doubled as the local barber.
The accident gave him yet another reason, on top of the webbed foot, pockmarks and rumours of bastardy, for vigilance and inferiority, for being different. It permanently damaged his left arm, which meant he could never be the beau ideal of the Georgian warrior—he later said it prevented him dancing properly, but he still managed to fight.† On the other hand it would save him from conscription and probable death in the trenches of the First World War. Yet Keke was worried about how it would affect the future bishop. “When you’re a priest, sonny,” she asked him, “how will you hold the chalice?”
“Never mind, Mummy!” replied Soso. “Before I’m a priest, my arm will heal so that I’ll be able to hold up the whole church!”7
Playing chicken was not the only danger in the streets of Gori, which were notoriously out of the control of the Tsarist authorities. Henceforth, even though he would swiftly become the best scholar at his school, young Stalin lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence—choirboy-cum-streetfighter, half—overdressed mummy’s boy, half-urchin.
“There was hardly a day,” says Father Charkviani’s son, Kote, when “someone had not beaten him up, sent him home crying—or when he hadn’t beaten up someone else.”8 Go
ri was that sort of town.
* For what it is worth, Adolf Hitler was beaten by his drunken father, Alois. Stalin did not become a wife-or child-beater, although he was a destructive husband and father. He was at least partly to blame for the early deaths of both his wives. He abandoned his illegitimate children, ignored his son Yakov for almost fifteen years and then bullied him. Of the children of his second marriage, he both overpromoted and crushed his son Vasily. He sometimes smacked him but then the dictator’s son developed into a spoiled and unmanageable little tyrant himself. Vasily became a hopeless alcoholic, the condition perhaps inherited from Beso. Stalin was loving to his daughter, Svetlana, until she became independent: he once slapped her as a teenager—but only when she was having an affair with a married womanizer in his forties. For the story of his second marriage and the fate of his children, see this author’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.
* Dato was still a cobbler fifty years later, in 1940, when Stalin ordered one of the Egnatashvilis to invite him to Moscow for a reunion. See Epilogue.
* The school still stands in Gori and was being renovated in 2006: until Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 it bore the inscription HERE IN THE FORMER CHURCH SCHOOL THE GREAT STALIN STUDIED FROM 1 SEPTEMBER 1888 TO JULY 1894.
* This is one of the reminiscences of Peter Kapanadze, Stalin’s close friend with whom he maintained friendly contact. Kapanadze’s very complimentary memoirs were published in the 1930s but this was one of the details that were left out of the official version—it appears in the archival original.
† This damaged left arm is variously blamed on a sledge accident, a birth defect, a childhood infection, a wrestling injury, a fight over a woman in Chiatura, a carriage accident and a beating from his father, all (except the birth defect) suggested by Stalin himself. There is much confusion about Stalin’s accident probably because there were in fact two accidents: there was this, less serious accident when he had just started school (according to Keke) or aged six (according to later health reports), which probably damaged the arm, an injury that became more noticeable in old age. Then, not long afterwards, there was a much graver accident in which he was seriously hurt and for which he needed treatment in Tiflis: this damaged his legs. In her memoirs Keke, aged eighty, seems to have merged them together.
3
Brawlers, Wrestlers and Choirboys
Little Stalin now spent his spare time, away from Keke, on the streets of Gori, a liberated and violent place dominated by drinking, prayer and brawling.
Soso had every reason to escape from a home which was always dark and poor. “Day after day, Keke sat at her rickety sewing-machine.” There was nothing but “two wooden couches, a couple of stools, a lamp and a simple table covered in textbooks,” says a frequent visitor, Stalin’s singing-master Simon Gogchilidze. The tiny room was “always clean and tidy” but Stalin’s bed was made of planks: “As he got taller, his mother added a plank to make the bed longer.” But Soso now defied his mother. “If you knew how haughty and proud he is!” she grumbled.1
He was a typical Goreli, for the denizen of Gori was notorious throughout Georgia as a matrabazi, a boastful, violent scallywag. Gori was one of the last towns to practise the “picturesque and savage custom” of free-for-all town brawls with special rules but no-holds-barred violence. The boozing, praying and fighting were all interconnected, with drunken priests acting as referees. The saloon-bars of Gori were incorrigible stews of violence and crime.2
The Russian and Georgian administrators had tried to ban this dubious sport that originated as military training at a time when medieval Georgia was constantly at war. Despite the presence of a Russian barracks, the pristav—local police chief—Davrichewy and his few policemen could hardly cope: no one could quell Gori’s irrepressible lawlessness. It was no wonder too that, during the punch-ups, horses bolted and phaetons knocked down youngsters on the streets. Psychological historians attribute much of Stalin’s development to his drunken father, but this streetfighting culture was just as formative.
Gori, wrote the visiting writer Maxim Gorky, “has a picturesque and original wildness all of its own. The sultry sky, the noisy turbulent waters of the Kura, the mountains in the near distance with their cave city, and farther away the Caucasus with its snows that never melt.”
Gori’s yellow, turreted fortress was probably built by Queen Tamara in the twelfth century. When her empire fragmented, Gori became the capital of one of the Georgian principalities.* It was a stop on the route from Central Asia. Camels still passed through on their way to Tiflis, but the opening of the railway to the Black Sea in 1871 downgraded this once proud town into a chaotic provincial backwater with grand connections and a specially riotous tradition. With just one proper street (then Tsar Street, now Stalin Street) and one square, children played, amid ambling oxen, in winding alleys half flooded by open drains. There were just 7,000 Gorelis, half of them Georgians like the Djugashvilis, half of them Armenians, like Kamo’s family: the Armenians provided the entrepreneurs. There were just eighteen Jews. Much more important was Gori’s division into two main neighbourhoods because these were the teams in the town brawls: the Russian Quarter and the Fortress Quarter.
Town brawls, wrestling tournaments and schoolboy gang-warfare were the three Goreli fighting traditions. At festivals, Christmas or Shrovetide before Lent, both quarters fielded a parade led by transvestites or actors riding as “carnival kings” on camels and donkeys, surrounded by pipe players and singers in fancy dress. At the Keenoba carnival to celebrate Georgia’s 1634 victory over Persia, one actor played the Georgian Tsar, another the Persian Shah—who was soon pelted with fruit, then doused in water.
The males in each family, from children upwards, also paraded, drinking wine and singing until night fell, when the real fun began. This “assault of free boxing”—the sport of krivi—was a “mass duel with rules”: boys of three wrestled other three-year-olds, then children fought together, then teenagers and finally the men threw themselves into “an incredible battle,” by which time the town was completely out of control, a state that lasted into the following day—even at school, where classes fought classes. Shops were often pillaged.3
Gori’s favourite sport was the wrestling of champions, which resembled somewhat the biblical story of Goliath. It was a great leveller. Tournaments—tschidooba—took place in specially erected rings to the accompaniment of an orchestra of zurnas. Rich princes, like local landowner Prince Amilakhvari, and merchants, even villages, fielded their own champions, regarded with such esteem that they were addressed by the title palavani. Stalin’s godfather, Egnatashvili, was himself one of three champion brothers. Now he was older, and rich, Palavani Egnatashvili fielded his own champions. Even in old age, Stalin was still boasting about his godfather’s pugilistic triumphs:
Those Egnatashvilis were such famed wrestlers they were known through the whole of Kartli, but the first and strongest of them was Yakov.
Prince Amilakhvari had a bodyguard who was a Chechen giant. When he challenged the Gori champions, he beat everyone. So the Gorelis went to Yakov Egnatashvili, who said: “Let him fight my brother Kika; if he beats Kika, let him fight my brother Simon; if he beats him, I’ll fight him.” But Kika beat the Chechen Goliath.
Once some bandits swaggered into town during a religious fete, wearing sheepskin hats and daggers.
They drank at the Egnatashvili tavern, then refused to pay. “We children,” recalled Stalin, watched in amazement as Kika Egnatashvili “smashed one of them, knocked him down, grabbed a dagger from the other’s scabbard and hit that one with the blunt end. The third one paid his bill.”4
The church schoolboys joined in the semi-casual bare-knuckle fighting on Gori Cathedral Street. On threat of the detention cell and ultimately expulsion, the schoolboys were absolutely banned from these vicious scrummages, “but Soso still took part.” Besides, his maths and geography teacher, Iluridze, loved to watch his boys in streetfights, yelling, “GO! Go!
Well done!” and barely noticing if he was himself hit in the process or spattered with blood.5
“Little Stalin boxed and wrestled with a certain success,” agrees Davrichewy.* His singing teacher observed him setting up wrestling matches, but once he hurt his already fragile arm. “It started as a wrestling match then turned into real boxing,” recounts the master, “and they beat each other up.” Soso’s arm swelled up painfully and made it harder to fight by the rules.
His friend Iremashvili fought Stalin in the schoolyard. The bout was declared a draw, but as Iremashvili turned away Stalin ambushed him from behind, hurling him onto the grass. When he fearlessly took on stronger fighters, Soso was beaten within an inch of his life and Keke had to rescue him, running to the police chief crying, “My God, they’ve killed my son.” But Stalin remained the most sartorially immaculate street-fighter in his year: “Sometimes his mother even dressed him in a big white collar that, as soon as her back was turned, he would take it off and put in his pocket.”
The boys’ real energies were reserved for gang-warfare. “The kids of our hometown were organized into gangs based on the streets or quarter where they lived. These bands were in constant warfare”—though they were melting-pots too. “Gori’s kids were educated together in the street without distinction of religion, nationality or fortune.” A ragamuffin like Stalin played in the streets with the son of Prince Amilakhvari—a famous general—who tried to teach him to swim. The children, armed with knives, bows and arrows, or catapults, led a blissfully free if wild existence: they swam in the river, they sang their favourite songs, pillaged apples from Prince Amilakhvari’s orchard, mischievously ranging across the countryside. Once Stalin set the Prince’s orchards alight.