Stalin: A Biography

Other versions exist of Joseph’s ancestry. The most bizarre suggests that one of the most famous ethnographers and explorers of the day, the noble Nikolai Przewalski, had an illicit liaison with Keke Dzhughashvili and that Joseph was the product. This is not only unlikely: it is physically impossible. Przewalski was not even present in Georgia at the time when Joseph Dzhughashvili was conceived.¹⁴ None of this is very surprising. As rulers from obscure backgrounds become famous it is conventional for legends to grow up about them, and often the rumour starts that in reality their parentage was more illustrious than it seemed.

A variant of this is that the leader was not of the nationality that was claimed. In Stalin’s case the word was that he was not Georgian at all but an Ossetian. This would trace the ancestry of the Dzhughashvili family (but not the Geladze) to the mountains beyond Georgia’s northern frontier. The name itself could well have a non-Georgian root of precisely this kind. The peoples of the Caucasus had moved around the region for centuries and even the sleepy town of Gori had its interlopers long before the Russians imposed themselves. Behind the story of Ossetian descent, though, lies the innuendo that this explains the wildness of Stalin’s later tyranny since the mountain peoples are widely regarded as less civilised than the town dwellers of the valleys. For some Georgians, moreover, such a genealogy expunges their shame in being associated with so notorious a despot. None of his school friends mentions any of this in his memoirs, but attention was almost certainly drawn to it in his childhood.¹⁵ Although Joseph Dzhughashvili grew up proud of belonging by birth and culture to the Georgian people, he may have disguised an early sense of being different from most other boys in the town.

The stories told by Stalin to friends and relatives from the 1930s onwards are one of the main sources for what happened in his childhood. Yet it hardly needs to be emphasised that he was an inveterate liar — and even when not lying directly, he often exaggerated or distorted the truth. His usual tale of childhood was filled with outbursts of drunken violence by Besarion, but all his stories have to be treated with caution. When in 1931 Stalin was asked about his childhood by the writer Emile Ludwig, he strenuously rebuffed suggestions of mistreatment: ‘No,’ he asserted, ‘my parents were uneducated people but they didn’t handle me at all badly.’¹⁶ This was out of line with his other recollections. He told his daughter Svetlana about how he stood up to his father and threw a knife at him when Keke was taking yet another beating. The knife missed its aim. Besarion hurled himself at young Joseph but was too slow to catch him. Joseph ran off and was hidden by neighbours until his father’s rage had spent itself.¹⁷

The memoirs of his friends without exception affirm that Beso was a brute to his son. Keke too was reportedly not averse to giving him a thrashing.¹⁸ If this was true, the Dzhughashvili household was filled with violence, and little Joseph must have grown up assuming that this was in the natural order of things. Perhaps he contradicted this when being interviewed by Ludwig because he sensed that he was being probed for a psychological origin of his political severity. No psychoanalytical sophistication is required. Like many who have been bullied in childhood, Joseph grew up looking for others whom he could bully. Not everyone beaten by parents acquires a murderous personality. Yet some do, and it would seem that more do than is true for general society. What made things worse for Joseph’s subsequent development was that his father’s violence was neither merited nor predictable. It is scarcely astounding that he grew up with a strong tendency towards resentment and retaliation.

Keke Dzhughashvili was strict with him but also smothered him with attention and affection. In an unguarded moment with Soviet army commander Georgi Zhukov in the Second World War he said that she never let him out of her sight till he was six years old. He also said that he had been a sickly infant.¹⁹ This was putting it mildly. Around the age of six he fell victim to smallpox. His mother was frantic. Smallpox was often a fatal disease and for a time it looked as if she would lose him. Poor families like the Dzhughashvilis could not afford doctors’ visits and their medicines. Most people in Gori in any case retained faith in the rural ways of dealing with disease. A female healer — Stalin was later to call her a znakharka when speaking in Russian — was summoned to treat Joseph. Against the odds, he recovered. The after-effects were limited to facial pockmarks. Joseph Dzhughashvili had had a narrow escape. This was to be a pattern in years to come. Although Joseph was prone to illnesses, his physical resilience saw him through.²⁰