Stalin and His Hangmen Read Online Free Page B

(his earnings as a Supreme Soviet deputy). In 1951, General Nikolai Vlasik, the commandant at Stalin’s dacha, drew up a list of Stalin’s surviving relatives and schoolmates for a bus trip to a reunion in Georgia. Vlasik would not have dared to do so had Stalin not shown some last flicker of human affection.
The most telling events in Stalin’s childhood are his brushes with death: his years in Georgia were marked by crippling illnesses and ghastly traffic accidents. All his life Stalin was rarely free of physical pain – which must have stimulated his sadism and irritability – and most of his pain, mental as well as physical, was a residue of childhood. He survived all the childhood illnesses – from measles to scarlet fever – that had carried off his infant brothers but in 1884 caught smallpox and was left badly scarred, earning the nickname Chopura (Poxy). Soon afterwards he was run over by a carriage, and the subsequent blood poisoning apparently withered his left shoulder and arm. In early 1890 in another street accident his legs were run over by a carriage and Ioseb acquired another nickname, Geza (Crooked). His injuries left him with a waddling, strutting walk and a decade later he would plead leg injuries to mitigate his prison sentences. Illnesses, psychological and physical, hold one key to Stalin’s pathological personality; the other is his pursuit of information. From a very early age he understood that ruthless aggression was useless unless he was armed with knowledge: he had to know his enemy and everything that his enemy knew. Very early in his life Stalin became an autodidact, and even in his senility he gathered and tried to retain all the information he could.
Not until her child was eight, a street urchin and, by some accounts, a violent brawler, did Katerine succeed in placing him in school. In 1886 the Jughashvilis had moved to the upper storey of a house owned by a priest, Kristopore Charkviani. Keke begged Charkviani to teach Ioseb to read and write Russian so that he could win a place in Gori’s clerical college, where instruction was mostly in Russian. In summer 1888, still only nine, Soso was accepted into the two-year preparatory class of the college; he learnt Russian so quickly that he graduated to the main school in one year.
Gori clerical college formed the young Stalin. Some of its teachers, particularly the Georgians, were radical intellectuals with considerable talents: one, Giorgi Sadzghelashvili, would become catholicos of the newly autocephalic Georgian Church in 1917; another, Zakare Davitashvili, belonged to literary and revolutionary circles. Davitashvili had Keke’s thanks for ‘singling out my son Soso… you helped him grow to love learning and because of you he knows the Russian language well.’ Even before puberty, Stalin combined the conformist’s desire to study with the radical’s instinct to rebel. At Gori he was influenced byclassmates with older brothers, such as the Ketskhovelis, one of whom had been expelled from Tbilisi seminary for radicalism.
Kinship and friendship also linked twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys with their teachers, and thus with Georgia’s radical intelligentsia as well as its merchants and officials. Georgia differed from Russia in that all educated men, regardless of their social origins and political alignments, were united in their resentment of Russian domination. Wealthy middle-aged capitalists would shelter impoverished radical schoolboys simply because they were fellow Georgians and fellow victims of the empire. That they were, to use Maupassant’s simile, like corn merchants protecting rats, apparently never occurred to these patrons of dissidence.
If Ioseb Jughashvili was disliked by his classmates for his surliness, he was favoured by teachers for his willingness to be class monitor, for his absorption in books and homework. Even the most hated teacher (as usual in Georgian schools, the Russian language teacher), Vladimir