Young Stalin Read Free Page B

world, certainly in Russia. Yet his entire personal wealth of land, jewels, palaces, art and mineral deposits were calculated in 1917 as being worth 14 million roubles which, transferred into today’s money, is a mere $140 million or £70 million—clearly an absurdly small figure.
    TITLES
    There are not always equivalents of Tsarist titles and ranks but I have tried to use as close an equivalent as possible. For the Russian autocrats, I use “Tsar” and “Emperor” interchangeably. Tsar Peter the Great crowned himself “Emperor” in 1721. The title of the ruler of the Caucasus varied. Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaievich, son and brother of emperors, was the viceroy. His successor, Prince Grigory Golitsyn, in office during Stalin’s seminary days, had the lesser rank of governor-general. His successor Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov would again be viceroy in 1905–16.
    DISTANCES/WEIGHTS
10 versts = 6.63 miles
1 pud = 36 lb.

PART ONE
Morning
The rose’s bud had blossomed out
Reaching out to touch the violet
The lily was waking up
And bending its head in the breeze
High in the clouds the lark
Was singing a chirruping hymn
While the joyful nightingale
With a gentle voice was saying—
“Be full of blossom, oh lovely land
Rejoice Iverians’ country
And you oh Georgian, by studying
Bring joy to your motherland.”
—SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

4

    A Hanging in Gori
    O n 6 January 1890, the choirboys, shepherded by singing teacher Gogchilidze, were trooping out of church after the Epiphany Day blessing for Gori’s Russian garrison. “No one noticed a runaway phaeton,” recalled Gogchilidze, which galloped straight into the crowd. Stalin, now twelve, was just crossing the road when the carriage “hurtled towards him, a pole hit his cheek, knocking him off his feet, [the wheels] running over his legs. The crowd stood round him and picked up the child who had lost consciousness and we carried him away.” The coachman was arrested and later sentenced to a month in jail, but poor Keke again had her bloodied child borne home. When he came round, he saw his desperate mother. “Don’t worry, Mummy, I’m all right,” he said pluckily. “I’m not going to die.” 1
    The injuries were so grave that Soso was taken to hospital in Tiflis, the capital, missing school for months. His legs were seriously damaged. Years later at the seminary, he complained of “sore legs” and, even when he recovered, he walked in the heavy, sideways gait that won him another nickname. Already the Pockmarked (Chopura), he became the Loper (Geza). More than ever, he must have yearned to prove his strength yet also enjoyed the confidence of overcoming such adversity.
    The accident brought Beso out of the shadows with a vengeance—the cobbler probably visited the boy in Tiflis. Keke had to let him know thatthe child was so ill. But Beso could not resist an opportunity to reimpose himself on his defiant family. As soon as Soso had recovered in Tiflis, his father kidnapped the boy and enrolled him as an apprentice cobbler at the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory, where he himself worked.
    “You want my son to be a bishop? Over my dead body, he’ll be educated!” he shouted at Keke. “I’m a shoemaker and my son will be one too.”
    Beso and his son now toiled with the eighty-strong Adelkhanov workforce for long hours and low wages in a half-flooded cellar lit by kerosene lamps amid the almost faecal reek of tanning leather. The stink made grown men vomit. Even the Tsarist authorities were worried about the number of child workers in Adelkhanov’s grim rectangular factory. Living with his father in a room in the Avlabar workers’ district and walking into work over the bridge past the Metekhi Fortress-Prison, Soso had to carry shoes from the factory to the shop-warehouse in the bazaar off Yerevan Square. Apart from the short spell in his father’s Gori workshop, this was to be Stalin’s only experience of a worker’s existence during a life devoted to