Stalin: A Biography

Stalin (Dzhughashvili), Joseph Vissarionovich was born on 21 December 1879 in the town of Gori in Tiflis Province. His father Vissarion Ivanovich, a Georgian by nationality, was descended from peasants of Didi-Lilo village, Tiflis province and was a cobbler by trade who later became a worker at the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory. His mother Yekaterina Georgievna came from the Geladze family of bound peasants in Gambareuli village.

In autumn 1888 Stalin entered the Gori spiritual school. In 1894 Stalin finished school and entered the Orthodox spiritual seminary in Tiflis.

The Soviet media at the time of the book’s publication deluged citizens of the USSR with extravagant claims on his behalf; but the years of boyhood and adolescence attracted meagre attention.

Communists of Stalin’s vintage discouraged accounts which dwelt on the personal aspects of their lives. For them, politics mattered above all else. But Stalin had a fastidiousness which was extreme even by the standards of his party, and he summoned the authors of his biography to the Kremlin to discuss their draft.² It was evidently at his insistence that just two short paragraphs covered his early years. The last thing he wanted, as a Georgian ruling over Russians, was to shine a bright light on his national origins. There were other reasons why his childhood embarrassed him. As a man from an unhappy family he did not intend the world to know about the damage it had done to him — and he was very far from being proud of his father. As a revolutionary and militant atheist he disdained to acknowledge the contribution made by the Imperial regime and the Orthodox Church to his personal development. Frugality with facts served a further purpose. By wrapping himself in mystery in the eyes of Soviet citizens, Stalin hoped to enhance popular admiration for himself as a ruler. From his studies of Russian history he knew that the most effective tsars had restricted knowledge about their private lives and opinions. By limiting what his biographers could write, he aspired to rise in the esteem of Soviet citizens.

Falsification came easily to him. The first sentence of that official biography was a lie because Joseph Dzhughashvili entered this life not on 21 December 1879 but on 6 December 1878. The truth has been ascertained by searches in the parochial records in Gori.³ It is uncertain why he practised this deceit. But it was not a mistake: Stalin was always careful about such details. We can only speculate at this distance in time. Apparently he started to fib about his birthday after leaving the Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, and it may be that his motive was to avoid military conscription: certainly many Georgians in those years tampered with the records for this purpose. Another possibility is that he was simply trying to confuse the police as to when he entered the revolutionary movement.⁴

About some things he told the truth. His father Besarion (or Vissarion in Russian) was indeed a cobbler married to Ketevan (or Yekaterina in Russian) and they lived in Gori. The Dzhughashvilis were subjects of the Russian tsars. The completed conquest of the Caucasus region had occurred only in the mid-1860s after the capture of the Islamist rebel Shamil from Dagestan Imperial forces in 1859. Parts of Georgia had not altogether lost their autonomous status until the second half of the nineteenth century. It had been the east Georgian ruler Irakli II who in 1783 had requested that his kingdom should become a Russian protectorate. Further territorial adhesions followed from the territory of the Georgians. Steadily the tsars repealed the agreements to grant exemptions from the pattern of rule in the rest of their empire. Garrisons were established. The Georgian Orthodox Church’s autocephaly was abolished in 1811. Russian peasants were given land in Georgia. The teaching of the Georgian language was restricted in schools and seminaries. The Georgian press was cramped. Georgians were robbed of their national dignity by the Russian administrators and commanders sent to the south Caucasus.