Young Stalin Read Online Free Page B

Russia’s most celebrated writer.
    The Gorelis sympathized with these brave Caucasian bandits—two of them Ossetians, one an Imeretian. The executions were a Russian show of strength; young Davrichewy called the condemned men “holy martyrs.” The crowd became menacing; double ranks of Russian soldiers encircled the square. The drums began to beat. “The authorities in uniforms lingered around the scaffold,” wrote Gorky in his article. “Their dreary and severe faces looked strange and hostile.” They had reason to be nervous.
    The three bandits in leg irons were marched onto the scaffold. One was separated from the others—he had been reprieved. The priest offered the two condemned men his blessings; one accepted and one refused. Both asked for a smoke and a sip of water. Sandro Khubuluri was silent, but the handsome and strong “ringleader,” Tato Jioshvili, smiled and joked valiantly before the admiring crowd. He leaned on the railings of the gallowsand, noticed Gorky, “chatted to people who had come to see him die.” The crowd threw stones at the hangman, who was masked and clad completely in scarlet. He placed the condemned on stools and tightened the nooses around their necks. Sandro just twirled his moustache and readjusted the noose. The time had come.
    The hangman kicked away the stools. As so often with Tsarist repression, it was inept: Sandro’s rope broke. The crowd gasped. The scarlet hangman replaced him on the stool, placed a new noose round his neck and hanged him again. Tato also took a while to die.
    The townsfolk and the schoolboys hurried away. Stalin and his school friends discussed what would happen to the souls of the executed: would they go to hellfire? Stalin settled their doubts. “No,” he said. “They’ve been executed and it would be unjust to punish them again.” The boys thought this made sense. The hanging is often cited as an event that stimulated Stalin’s murderous nature, but all we know is that the boys sympathized with these Georgian outlaws, and disdained their Russian oppressors. If anything, the spectacle helped make Stalin a rebel, not a murderer. 5
    It was time to move on from Gori: Soso was about to graduate from the church school. Keke often sat at the head of his bed at dawn silently admiring her brilliant slumbering child. “My Soso had grown up,” she says, but they still spent much time together. “We’d hardly ever been separated. He was always beside me.” Even when he had been ill, “he used to read sitting next to me. His only other entertainment was walking along the river or up Mount Gorijvari.”
    Yet now she realized that to fulfil her dreams she had to let him go even though “he couldn’t survive without me and I without him but his thirst for learning forced him to leave me.” This thirst was indeed something that never left him. * Naturally, after the church school, he had to go to the best religious educational establishment in the southern Empire: the Tiflis Seminary. In July 1893, aged fifteen, he passed his exams with flying colours. All his teachers, especially Simon Gogchilidze, recommended him to the seminary—but there was a problem.
    “One day Soso came home” to his mother “with tears in his eyes.”
    “What’s the matter, son?” asked Keke.
    Soso explained that the strike and closure of the seminary in Tiflis, orchestrated partly by his radical friend Lado Ketskhoveli, meant “he could lose a year because there were no new entrants that summer who were not priests’ sons.”
    “I comforted my son,” Keke says, “and then I dressed up,” probably in her best headdress, and called on Soso’s teachers and patrons, who promised to help. The singing master offered to take Soso himself and enrol him in teacher-training college. But, for Keke, it had to be the best and it had to be the priesthood: that meant the seminary.
    Keke set out for Tiflis with her son. Soso was excited but on the forty-five-mile train ride, he