Stalin and His Hangmen Read Online Free PDF Page A

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-rouble annual fee and gave the boy a scholarship of three, later seven, roubles 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 matriculated 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.
The seminary gave by far the best education in Tbilisi. It was a strange institution where obscurantist Orthodox monk-teachers (mostlyRussians appointed by the viceroy of the Caucasus) fought the mainly Georgian liberals among staff and students. Disruption in the seminary was a perennial topic in the Georgian press for the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. In the early 1890s, the heavy hand of Tsar Alexander III’s bureaucracy began to lose its grip. The new generation of students was more radical and the ferment such that one rector, Kersky, was demoted by the government to monkhood, and another, Chudetsky, was murdered by a former student. The writer Iakob Gogebashvili, like many Georgian luminaries a former teacher there, declared that any student, Russian or Georgian, not gripped by egotistical fear would rebel against the seminary authorities. 7 In 1893, the year before Jughashvili entered, the students’ protests and demonstrations frightened the seminary’s hierarchs to such a degree that tuition was suspended and troublemakers expelled.
Despite antagonism between Russian staff and Georgian students, there were some Russian teachers whom Stalin and his classmates later recalled with respect, even reluctant affection. Some reactionaries on the staff were men of character: the deputy rector in the mid-1890s, Father Germogen, later became bishop of Tobolsk and a member of the Holy Synod. In 1914 he was dismissed for denouncing Grigori Rasputin and in 1918 he tried to rescue Tsar Nicholas II from captivity.
Although he had no clerical background, Jughashvili impressed the seminary enough to be awarded a half-scholarship. The withdrawn, introverted surliness that repelled his fellow students seemed to his teachers the seriousness of a dedicated scholar. It took time for Jughashvili’s religious conformism to collapse under the influence of the radicals in the seminary. Even in 1939, in the USSR, it was admitted in print: ‘Ioseb in his first years of study was very much a believer, going to all the services, singing in the church choir… he not only observed all religious rites but always reminded us to carry them out.’ 8
Stalin’s career at the seminary falls into two periods. Until 1896, when he was seventeen, he was an exemplary student. He acquired the rudiments of classical and modern languages and had begun to read widely in secular Russian and European literature as well as in sacred texts. He had a basic knowledge of world history. His reports show him as fifth in his class with top marks for behaviour, Georgian, church singing, mathematics and ‘very good’ for Greek. He rebelled in