Stalin: A Biography

Iremashvili wrote his memoir years after fleeing from Soviet Georgia; he can hardly have remembered Joseph’s exact words in the churchyard. He had also become Stalin’s personal and political enemy and wanted to sell as many copies of his book as he could. Did he perhaps embroider the truth? In other memoirs about the period before 1917 a different Joseph Dzhughashvili is depicted: introverted, secretive, taciturn and unemotional.¹⁰ Yet even if Iremashvili exaggerated or invented a little, he should not be dismissed. He had known Dzhughashvili since early childhood and knew all about the emotional side of his personality. They had been seminarists together when Dzhughashvili was writing poems in a romantic vein. Moreover, they were Georgians attending an Orthodox funeral and Joseph Dzhughashvili acted conventionally in showing family and friends how deeply he mourned his wife.

Dzhughashvili’s reported comment is anyway a clichéd one which indicates a widower more concerned with himself than with Ketevan or his son. He had not even bothered to live with her throughout the last months of her illness. That Joseph was shaken by her death, though, is beyond dispute. What is less plausible is that this single event was the decisive one in turning him into a man seeking murderous revenge on humanity in general. There were many such events in his long life. His friends and associates noted how each event made him harsher in his dealings with the world. Iremashvili stated that even before Ketevan’s death it was obvious that Joseph acted with contempt towards everyone except his mother, wife and son.¹¹ Her passing left him with his young son Yakob. Yet he did not let bereavement get in the way of political activity. Having chosen the life of a full-time revolutionary, he was not going to let parenthood burden him. Total personal freedom was required for this, and he asked his in-laws, the Svanidzes, to take Yakob off his hands. Ketevan had three sisters and a brother. To Joseph’s relief, these relatives were happy to foster the lad. They also stood by Joseph when he ran out of money.¹²

He must have compared himself ruefully with émigré Bolsheviks in their little colonies in Switzerland and France. Most leading emigrants could live off private incomes. They could visit libraries, write letters to each other and go on holidays without worrying whether the Okhrana was tailing them. (The police agents in their midst did not much alter the daily habits of the émigrés even though everyone knew they existed.) They had time to write and opportunities to publish. They could meet foreign revolutionaries. They did not need to grub out a life while being constantly on the run. They were not threatened by prison or Siberian exile.

Apart from his comrades, Dzhughashvili was alone in the world. He saw nothing of his mother who was still in Gori. His father had long passed out of contact. Not that this stopped Joseph thinking about him. In one of his early articles he offered the following account:¹³

Let’s take a simple example. Just imagine a cobbler who had a tiny workshop but could not survive the competition with larger bosses and closed his workshop and perhaps went off to work in the shoe factory belonging to Adelkhanov in Tiflis. He entered employment with Adelkhanov not to become a permanent hired labourer but rather in order to save some money, put aside a little capital and reopen his workshop. As you see, that cobbler already has a proletarian condition but his consciousness is not yet proletarian: it is thoroughly petit-bourgeois.

These details are so near to the pattern of his father’s life that Joseph must surely have been describing him. Beso’s fate was an unhappy one. After splitting from Keke and Joseph he had gone on working and drinking in Tbilisi, and Joseph later claimed that he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in 1909.¹⁴