Stalin and His Hangmen Read Online Free PDF Page B

at some point took care of her. 9
The seminary was generous to its wayward student: the marks in Jughashvili’s leaving certificate reflect his exemplary early years. But the seminary fined him seventeen roubles for unreturned library books – all his life Stalin hung on to books he had borrowed – and they demanded 630 roubles – two years’ salary from Stalin’s first employment – to repay his scholarship, since he had dishonoured his undertaking to repay his education by becoming a priest or schoolteacher.
    Being Georgian
When in 1937 writers were commissioned to write about Stalin’s childhood some took as their model the childhood of Jesus Christ – a risky but tempting choice. Jesus and Stalin both had an artisan father who verysoon played no role in the family, an austere mother and an abrupt end, at the age of twelve, to any semblance of family life. Such adolescents may show tremendous self-sufficiency to the point of never trusting another human being, as well as intellectual precocity and vehement intolerance of others’ views, but countless thousands of them do not rise to tyrannize the world. The qualities that determined Stalin’s rise – first, a sense, a conviction, of his mission to rule; second, an acute sense of timing; and third, a deep insight into others’ motivation and a hypnotist’s skill in manipulating them – were yet to manifest themselves.
What we know of Stalin’s formative years – a traumatic home life, a brilliant school career, a crippled body, a vigorous intellect – are cliches in the biographies of many men and women. Being a provincial or a member of an ethnic minority is also a virtual prerequisite for any tyrant, but how did being Georgian shape Stalin’s destiny? Being Georgian gave Stalin far more than the provincial’s inferiority complex, the need to prove himself to a metropolitan world. His Georgian heritage was a source of superiority: it justified his adopting an outlook more cruel and ruthless than those humanistic cliches of nineteenth-century Europe which other Russian revolutionaries had to overcome in order to destroy the existing order and impose their own.
In later life, Stalin’s ethnic ties seemed as weak as his family bonds. In 1950 a group of Georgian historians was summoned to the Kremlin to hear Stalin’s pontifications on their work. They were puzzled by Stalin’s use of pronouns: ‘They, the Russians, don’t appreciate… You, the Georgians, have failed to mention…’ If the Russians were ‘they’ and the Georgians ‘you’, then what nationality was ‘I’ or ‘we’? Like many non-Russian Bolsheviks – Jews, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Armenians or Georgians – Stalin had discarded one ethnos without acquiring another: should not citizenship of a socialist society transcend ethnic affiliation? But Stalin remained Georgian more deeply than Feliks Dzierżyński remained Polish, or Leon Trotsky Jewish, and to penetrate his motivations we must ponder his Georgian upbringing and heritage.
Victims and enemies of Stalin naturally ascribed his vindictiveness, his rage at any slight to his dignity, to his Georgian culture. Stalin’s younger son Vasili yelled, when drunk, ‘In our family we never forgive an offence.’ For Russians and Turks the cliché that no Caucasian can leave an insult unavenged is a self-evident truth. Stalin has, however, deepertraits of the Caucasian male: emotions, with the exception of anger and indignation, are in the Caucasus not to be revealed outside the family home. Georgian social life is as ritualized as English Victorian behaviour. Such ritualization taught Stalin to act in public and with outsiders in ways that completely belied his real motives and feelings. Likewise, the liberal sexual morals of the revolutionary only overlaid the rigid puritanism of the Caucasian. Stalin studiously annotated his copy of Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family as if he shared the author’s egalitarian views,