Stalin and His Hangmen Read Online Free PDF

earnestin 1897, his third year. The previous year, when a crowd had been trampled to death at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in Moscow, Russian public opinion had turned hostile to the new Tsar, his ministers and the imperial establishment. Jughashvili’s conformism was swept away in this tide of radical anger. His faith collapsed; his term reports become deplorable. By 1898 Jughashvili had fallen to twentieth in the class, he had failed scripture and was due to retake his annual examinations.
The reading prescribed at Tbilisi seminary was theological, and the lives of the Church fathers were the perfect preparation for reading the classics of Marxism. Ten years of ecclesiastical reading turned Stalin into that chimerical creature: the diehard atheist with a profound knowledge and love of religious texts and music. In his sixties Stalin sought out others who had had a seminary education – Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the opera bass Maksim Mikhailov. To them he remarked, ‘One thing priests teach you is to understand what people think’.
Stalin’s transition to atheism was neither abrupt nor complete. His atheism was a rebellion against God rather than a disavowal of the deity. The transition from Orthodoxy to Marxism, from the discipline of the Church to that of the party, is easy. Stalin went only halfway. Marxists declare man to be naturally good; all evil stems from social injustice. Stalin knew all human beings to be sinners in need of punishment and expiation. He took with him into power the deeply held conviction that the duty of the ruler was not to make his subjects happy but to prepare their souls for the next world.
At the seminary Stalin’s intellectual interests veered towards forbidden authors and topics. He was now boarding in the same house as the young philosopher Seit Devdariani and illicitly subscribing to the Georgian Society for the Spreading of Literacy, which had a cheap lending library. The cluster of acolytes around Seit and Jughashvili still regarded themselves as trainee priests; the aim that bonded them was to broaden their education through reading political and scientific literature. The books, if found, were confiscated by their teachers, and persistent disobedience of the seminary rules led to imprisonment in a cell on a diet of bread and water.
Seit Devdariani was too mild a philosopher for Jughashvili, and in any case was off to Estonia to study at Tartu (Iuriev) university. In 1897 Jughashvili came under the spell of a more charismatic activist, LadoKetskhoveli, who had just returned to Tbilisi from Kiev university after being expelled for reading forbidden literature. Ketskhoveli managed an underground printshop and was Stalin’s first contact with the world of revolutionary propaganda. Under Ketskhoveli’s tutelage Jughashvili now read exegeses of Marxism, not of the Bible. By 1898 he was engaged outside the seminary in propaganda work among Tbilisi’s largest proletarian group, the Caucasian railway workers. He earned money by coaching a boy for entry to the seminary. That autumn the seminary considered expelling Jughashvili; he suffered reprimands, searches and detentions but he was more preoccupied with fomenting a strike of railway engineers in December 1898.
On 29 May 1899 the seminary announced: ‘I. V. Jughashvili is expelled from the seminary for failing for unknown reasons to appear for examinations.’ These ‘unknown reasons’ might have been propagating Marxism, not paying seminary fees after his scholarship was withdrawn or, as Katerine (who came to take him home) maintained, incipient TB. There may have been another reason. To judge by a semi-literate letter that Stalin hid in his private archive in April 1938 he had become in 1899 the father of a baby girl. All we know of her, apart from her later disappearance, was that she bore an extraordinary resemblance to Stalin, that she was called Pasha (Praskovia Georgievna Mikhailovskaia), and that Stalin’s mother