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rector for saying “Georgian was a dogs’ language.” The next year, the rector was murdered with a Georgian khanjali sword—a fate that even the most brutal English headmaster had managed to avoid.
    The seminary was to pull off the singular achievement of supplying the Russian Revolution with some of its most ruthless radicals. “No secular school,” wrote another seminarist, Stalin’s comrade Philip Makharadze, “produced as many atheists as the Tiflis Seminary.” The Stone Sack literally became a boarding-school for revolutionaries.
    Stalin was initially “calm, attentive, modest and bashful,” remembers one schoolmate, while another noticed the once swaggering Goreli gang leader turn “pensive and secluded, the love of games and fun of childhood gone.” The moody teenage Soso was taking stock—and becoming a self-conscious romantic poet—but he was also studying seriously, passing his first grade with an “excellent” mark and coming eighth out of the whole year. In 1894–95, he won straight 5s (A grades) for Georgian singing and language and scores like 4,5,4,5 in scripture. He was a model student, earning an “excellent 5” for behaviour.
    As a scholarship boy in “pitiful” circumstances, Soso constantly had to beg the rector “on my knees” for further help with the fees. * Stalin earned more pocket-money (five roubles, he recalled later) by singing in the choir. He was “the first tenor of the right wing of the choir”—the key choirboy—and often performed in the Opera House.
    Keke accompanied him to Tiflis and stayed for a few weeks to help him settle. She took a job sewing and serving food at the seminary—surely an embarrassment to Stalin, and perhaps another reason for his initial reticence. Mission accomplished, she returned to Gori. Henceforth, throughout his periods of exile, up until her death forty years on, Stalin wrote to her with dutiful regularity (especially when he needed money or clothes) but with growing detachment. He would never really return tothe mother whose remarkable drive and sharp tongue he had himself inherited, yet whom he found unbearable. 1
    Somehow Beso, lurking in Tiflis, discovered Soso as a potential source of wine-money: he went to see Stalin’s rector and demand his son back: “Make him leave because I need someone to take care of me!” Stalin was “unmoved,” wanting to alleviate “the hardship of Beso and people like him,” but repelled by the man himself.
    “Once,” recalled Stalin, “the nightwatchmen came in and told me that my father was outside.” The boy hurried downstairs and “saw him standing there. He didn’t even ask about me but just said briskly: ‘Young man, sir, you’ve totally forgotten your father, haven’t you? I’m leaving to work in another town.’”
    “How would I have any money to help you?” replied Stalin.
    “Shut up!” shouted Beso. “Give me at least 3 roubles and don’t be as mean as your mother!”
    “Don’t yell!” replied Soso. “This is my boarding-school. If you don’t leave now, I’ll call the watchmen and they’ll make you go.”
    The “threat worked,” recounted Stalin. “Father slunk away into the streets, muttering something.” 2
    In the holidays, Soso returned to Gori to see the doting Keke. Even though he “was starting to grow a beard, he still nestled up to me like a five-year-old.” But he spent most of his time staying with his lame, well-off friend Mikha Davitashvili in his village, Tsromi. When he returned for the next term, Stalin did even better, winning another “excellent” and moving up to number five in his year. And he started to work on his verse.
    At the end of term, Soso took his poems to the offices of the famous newspaper Iveria (Georgia), where he was received by the country’s greatest poet, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, a romantic nationalist who believed in an agrarian Georgia ruled by an enlightened aristocracy.
    The Prince was sufficiently impressed to