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suddenly began to cry.
    “Mummy,” sobbed Stalin, “what if, when we arrive in the city, Father finds me and forces me to become a shoemaker? I want to study. I’d rather kill myself than become a cobbler.”
    “I kissed him,” reminisces Keke, “and wiped away his tears.”
    “Nobody will stop you studying,” she reassured him, “nobody is going to take you away from me.”
    Soso was impressed by Tiflis, the “throbbing bustle of the big city,” though both the Djugashvilis were “terrified that Beso would appear,” says Keke. “But we didn’t meet Beso.”
    The indomitable Keke rented a room, and searched out her one well-connected relative in the capital, who was the tenant of an even better-connected priest with a resourceful wife.
    “Please help this woman,” the relative told the priest’s wife, “and it will be as good a work as building a whole church.” * The priest’s wife appealed to more clergymen who spoke to the seminary and won Stalin the right to sit the entrance exam. That was all his mother wanted because “I knew he’d glorify me.” Indeed he did “glorify” her, but the cost for a non-priest’s son boarding at the seminary was 140 roubles a year, a sum Keke had no hope of raising on her own. Davrichewy, surely at Keke’s bidding, persuaded a well-known aristocrat, Princess Baratov, to help too. With Keke frantically pulling strings, Soso applied for a scholarship and was accepted as a half-boarder, which meant he still had to pay a considerable sum—forty roubles a year—and buy the surplice uniform. Keke did not mind: the “happiest mother in the world” returned to Gori and startedto sew to raise the money. Egnatashvili and Davrichewy contributed to his fees.
    “A month later,” says Keke, “I saw Soso in the uniform of the seminarist and I cried so much out of happiness. I grieved very much too . . .” Having enrolled around 15 August 1894, Soso entered the seminary boarding-school and the wider world of the capital of the Caucasus.
    The lame, pockmarked, web-toed boy, humiliatingly beaten and deserted by his father, adored but beaten some more by his single mother, haunted by bastardy, surviving accident and disease, had overcome the odds.
    It is hard to exaggerate what a vital moment this was. Without the seminary, without the mother’s determination, Soso would have missed the classical, if stifling, education that equipped the cobbler’s son to become Lenin’s successor.
    “He wrote to me that he would save me from poverty soon,” recalls his mother, the first of a lifetime of dutiful but distant letters from her beloved son. “When he sent me letters, I pressed them to my heart, slept with them and kissed them.”
    “Everyone at the school congratulated me,” adds Keke, “but only Simon Gogchilidze looked wistful: ‘The School seems somehow deserted,’ he said. * ‘Who’ll sing in the choir now?’” 6
* The singing teacher was not the only master who helped Stalin. Davitashvili’s older cousin Zakhary was another inspiring teacher of Russian literature, and years later Keke wrote, “I remember how you distinguished my son Soso and he told me many times that it was you who helped him grow fond of studying and it was thanks to you, he learned Russian so well.”
* Even as a septuagenarian dictator and conqueror of Berlin, he kept studying. “Look at me,” he said in about 1950, “I’m old and I’m still studying.” His library books are all carefully marked with his notes and marginalia. It was the thoughtful and diligent autodidactic fervour, well concealed under the crude manners of a brutal peasant, that his opponents such as Trotsky ignored at their peril.
* This was ironic given the number of beautiful and ancient churches that Stalin would later demolish and the number of priests he would execute.
* Stalin never forgot his singing teacher. When he wrote to Keke from exile or the underground, he would often send his regards to Simon