Alexander Finnegan, J.D. Law, Marxist Leninist
Stalin was a sweet and sensitive young boy, who loved his mother. His father was abusive to him, and would drink and abuse him. Sadly, his mother would abuse him too.
Stalin was born in Georgia in 1878, the only child of a cobbler, Beso Djugashvili and his wife, Keke. In her memoirs, released from a secret Soviet archive, she detailed how a series of illnesses and accidents left "Soso" - her nickname for Josef - partially crippled, and how he coped with a violent alcoholic father."My Soso was a very sensitive child," said Keke. "As soon as he heard the sound of his father singing balaam-balaam from the street, he'd immediately run to me asking if he could go to our neighbours' until his father fell asleep."Keke recounted how she used her child's love of flowers to encourage him to walk. Holding out a camomile, she would entice him to move towards her.She also wrote about her son's struggle to win a scholarship to the seminary of the Georgian capital, Tiflis, now Tbilisi, to become a student priest.On the train there, where his now estranged father was working, she recounted how her teenage son suddenly began to cry. "Mummy," he said, "what if, when we arrive in the city, father finds me and forces me to become a shoemaker? I want to study. I'd rather kill myself than become a cobbler.""I kissed him and wiped away his tears," she recalled, adding: "Nobody will stop you studying, nobody is going to take you away from me."Keke's memoirs were released by the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili at the request of Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book, Young Stalin, is published this month.Stalin later rebelled against his studies, however, and declared himself a revolutionary seeking the end of Tsarist Russia. Following his rise he installed Keke in a Tsarist palace in the Caucasus, but she occupied only one tiny room and died in 1937.[1]
Stalin’s mother
While still the finest choirboy at the church school, Stalin started to show an interest in the plight of the poor and to doubt his faith. He became close friends with three priests’ sons—the brothers Lado and Vano Ketskhoveli, who were to play a vital role in his future life, and Mikheil Davitashvili, * who, like Stalin, walked with a limp. The elder Ketskhoveli brother, Lado, soon entered the Tiflis Seminary and brought back news of how he had led a protest and strike that led to his being sent down. Stalin was inspired by these new friends and their books, but he still saw the priesthood as his vocation to help the poor. Now, however, he aspired to politics for the first time. Under Lado Ketskhoveli’s charismatic influence, he declared he wanted to be a local administrator with the power to improve conditions.He talked about books all the time. If he coveted a volume, he was happy to steal it from another schoolboy and run home with it. When he was about thirteen, Lado Ketskhoveli took him to a little bookshop in Gori where he paid a five kopeck subscription and borrowed a book that was probably Darwin’s Origin of Species. Stalin read it all night, forgetting to sleep, until Keke found him.“Time to go to bed,” she said. “Go to sleep—dawn is breaking.”“I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading . . .” As his reading intensified, his piety wavered.One day Soso and some friends, including Grisha Glurjidze, lay on the grass in town talking about the injustice of there being rich and poor when he amazed all of them by suddenly saying: “God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just.”“Soso! How can you say such things?” exclaimed Grisha.“I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.” He presented Glurjidze with a copy of Darwin.
Special thanks to Hersh Bortman for finding this wonderful excerpt.
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