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

The most telling events in Stalin’s childhood are his brushes with death: his years in Georgia were marked by crippling illnesses and ghastly traffic accidents. All his life Stalin was rarely free of physical pain—which must have stimulated his sadism and irritability—and most of his pain, mental as well as physical, was a residue of childhood. He survived all the childhood illnesses—from measles to scarlet fever—that had carried off his infant brothers but in 1884 caught smallpox and was left badly scarred, earning the nickname Chopura (Poxy). Soon afterward he was run over by a carriage, and the subsequent blood poisoning apparently withered his left shoulder and arm. In early 1890 in another street accident his legs were run over by a carriage and Ioseb acquired another nickname, Geza (Crooked). His injuries left him with a waddling, strutting walk and a decade later he would plead leg injuries to mitigate his prison sentences. Illnesses, psychological and physical, hold one key to Stalin’s pathological personality; the other is his pursuit of information. From a very early age he understood that ruthless aggression was useless unless he was armed with knowledge: he had to know his enemy and everything that his enemy knew. Very early in his life Stalin became an autodidact, and even in his senility he gathered and tried to retain all the information he could.

Not until her child was eight, a street urchin and, by some accounts, a violent brawler, did Katerine succeed in placing him in school. In 1886 the Jughashvilis had moved to the upper story of a house owned by a priest, Kristopore Charkviani. Keke begged Charkviani to teach Ioseb to read and write Russian so that he could win a place in Gori’s clerical college, where instruction was mostly in Russian. In summer 1888, still only nine, Soso was accepted into the two-year preparatory class of the college; he learned Russian so quickly that he graduated to the main school in one year.

Gori clerical college formed the young Stalin. Some of its teachers, particularly the Georgians, were radical intellectuals with considerable talents: one, Giorgi Sadzghelashvili, would become catholicos of the newly autocephalous Georgian Church in 1917; another, Zakare Davitashvili, belonged to literary and revolutionary circles. Davitashvili had Keke’s thanks for “singling out my son Soso . . . you helped him grow to love learning and because of you he knows the Russian language well.” Even before puberty, Stalin combined the conformist’s desire to study with the radical’s instinct to rebel. At Gori he was influenced by classmates with older brothers, such as the Ketskhovelis, one of whom had been expelled from Tbilisi seminary for radicalism.

Kinship and friendship also linked twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys with their teachers, and thus with Georgia’s radical intelligentsia as well as its merchants and officials. Georgia differed from Russia in that all educated men, regardless of their social origins and political alignments, were united in their resentment of Russian domination. Wealthy middle-aged capitalists would shelter impoverished radical schoolboys simply because they were fellow Georgians and fellow victims of the empire. That they were, to use Maupassant’s simile, like corn merchants protecting rats, apparently never occurred to these patrons of dissidence.

If Ioseb Jughashvili was disliked by his classmates for his surliness, he was favored by teachers for his willingness to be class monitor, for his absorption in books and homework. Even the most hated teacher (as usual in Georgian schools, the Russian language teacher), Vladimir Lavrov, known as the gendarme, put his trust in Ioseb Jughashvili. Just as well, for when Katerine became a pauper, the school waived the twenty-five-ruble annual fee and gave the boy a scholarship of three, later seven, rubles a month for “exemplary” performance. He came top in every subject and was an outstanding choirboy and reader in the college’s liturgical services.

When in 1894 Jughashvili graduated from Gori, he had acquired enough patronage to have a choice of further education. Tbilisi had no university, but it had two tertiary institutions: a pedagogical institute, where the Gori college singing teacher was moving and where he offered to take Jughashvili; and a theological seminary where, with help from his former teachers, Ioseb would be equally sure of placement. With examination results of “excellent” in Bible studies, Church Slavonic, and Russian, catechism, Greek, Georgian, geography, calligraphy, church singing, and Georgian (only in arithmetic did he gain just “very good”), Ioseb Jughashvili actually needed little patronage. Whatever his mother wished, and regardless of his own religious beliefs, the turbulent student life of the Tbilisi seminary would have lured any boy with a desire to make an impact on the world to choose a priest’s, rather than a pedagogue’s, path.