4. POET AND REBEL

Joseph Dzhughashvili, aged fifteen, left for Tbilisi in September 1894. This time he went not to the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory but to the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. Tiflis was the conventional foreign variant of the Georgian name Tbilisi; it was used not only in Russian but also in other European languages. Founded by the Russian Imperial authorities, the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary was at the top of Pushkin Street in the heart of the city. Although provided with board and lodging free of charge, Joseph Dzhughashvili had to pay for his tuition. This would have been a problem if he had not been able to earn a regular five rubles for singing in the Zion Cathedral down by the River Mtkvari.¹ He was not the only alumnus of the Gori Spiritual School who left for Tbilisi. Along with him at the Seminary were friends of his own age from Gori, including Peter Kapanadze, Joseph Iremashvili, Vano Ketskhoveli and M. Davitashvili.² (Joseph Davrishevi, whose father earned a decent salary, could afford the fees at the First Classical Gimnazia in Tbilisi.) Loneliness was not going to be a problem for Joseph Dzhughashvili.

He was arriving in the capital of Russian Imperial power in the south Caucasus. Tbilisi at the end of the nineteenth century was the largest city in that region of the Russian Empire with 350,000 inhabitants – only Baku on the Caspian Sea with 220,000 came remotely near in size. The Viceroy lived there and governed the dozens of peoples of the region, from the northern slopes of the Caucasus range down to the Ottoman border, on behalf of Emperor Nicholas II. The east Georgian kings had chosen Tbilisi as their capital for good reason. Like Gori, it straddled the River Mtkvari, which ran north from the mountains of Turkey; still more important in earlier centuries had been the fact that it lay across one of the ancient caravan routes that had enabled trade between central Asia and Europe. Consolidating Georgia’s permanent place in the Russian Empire, the St Petersburg government built the Georgian Military Road from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi. This route went from north to south. (The railway linking the south Caucasus with Russia went from Baku up the Caspian coast.) Two army corps were based in the garrison on Tbilisi’s east bank. Having completed the conquest of the region in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Romanovs allocated the personnel, communications and force needed to retain it.

Tbilisi, unlike Gori, had a multinational population wherein the Georgians themselves were a minority. Along with them were Russians, Armenians, Tatars, Persians and Germans. Russians lived in the centre on the west bank. Armenian and Persian bazaars lay near by. Georgians had their district on the other side of the river. To the north of them lived German immigrants who had moved there, mainly from Württem-berg, at Emperor Alexander I’s invitation.

Joseph therefore faced a conflict of cultures much more intense than in Gori. The Russian quarter in the centre contained the City Hall, the Viceroy’s Palace, the General Staff headquarters, the Orthodox Cathedral and other churches, the Imperial Bank, the Public Library and the Military Museum. The streets were straight, the buildings tall and recently built. The German quarter was distinguished by its cleanliness and social order. The Armenians and Persians, who were the city’s great entrepreneurs, had noisy, bustling bazaars trading in silverware, carpets and spices. Georgian shopkeepers specialised in groceries, fish and footwear. On the south-eastern side of the town there were the factories and the prison which were familiar from his time working for Adelkhanov. There was also a large railway depot and repair works in the capital’s Didube district. The city bustled with high-booted Russian soldiers, Tatar men in their green and white turbans (and their becowled wives) and Germans carefully attired in the mid-European style. These inhabitants themselves were outshone by the resplendence of the traders from the heights of the Caucasus in their traditional costumes: Ossetians, Kabardians, Chechens and Ingush.

Georgians had only a limited influence over the city’s affairs. St Petersburg’s appointees, usually Russians, ran the administration and led the armed forces. Banking was in Russian and Jewish hands and the largest commercial enterprises were owned by Armenians. The Russian hierarchy dominated the Georgian Orthodox Church since, in 1811, Emperor Alexander I had sanctioned its incorporation into the Russian Orthodox Church. The Tiflis Spiritual Seminary entered by Joseph was subject to the ecclesiastical authorities in St Petersburg.

The Seminary was a large building with a raised portico of Ionic columns surmounted by a pediment. Built by the sugar millionaire Zubalishvili, it had been bought from him in 1873 by the Russian Orthodox Church and converted to ecclesiastical use. The frontage was architecturally crude. There were no steps to the portico, which had been included for display rather than practical function. The peoples of the Caucasus were meant to be impressed with the grandeur of Imperial power, and the Seminary symbolised the suzerainty of the Romanovs over the spiritual as well as the temporal affairs of the region. The rest of the building was like a barracks.³ There were four floors. Near the entrance were the cloak room and the refectory. The first floor contained a large hall which had been converted into a chapel. The second and third floors consisted of classrooms and the fourth was given over to dormitories. The décor was plain and there was no privacy for the seminarists. An open corridor connected the dormitories; personal belongings were on open view. Cassocks, textbooks and Bible were standard issue. Like their fellows halfway down Golovin Prospect at the First Classical Gimnazia, the seminarists were being trained to serve God, Tsar and Empire.

At the time of Dzhughashvili’s arrival the Exarch of Georgia was Archbishop Vladimir. The Rector from 1898 was Germogen, a Russian. The Seminary Inspector was a Georgian called Abashidze. The Russian priesthood was not known for liberal political and social convictions. The appointees to the Georgian Exarchate were even more reactionary than the norm in Russia and several were to identify themselves publicly with the cause of Russian nationalism in later years. Many were virulent anti-semites propagating notions that can now be recognised as proto-fascist. While functioning in Georgia, they regarded it as their duty to stamp out signs of Georgian national assertiveness.⁴ They carried this intolerance to an extreme. The Georgian language was severely restricted in the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary and students were required to speak and write Russian or else face punishment. Archpriest Ioann Vostorgov, who influenced ecclesiastical educational policy across the Russian Empire, gave the rationale for this. He argued that Tbilisi was highly multiethnic and that there was no sense in privileging Georgian over other languages.⁵ Some priests less courteously referred to Georgian as ‘a filthy language’.⁶

The rules were strict. Seminarists were allowed into the city for just an hour a day. Gestures of respect were demanded for the Rector and his staff. Discipline was administered from Inspector Abashidze’s office to the left of the foyer. Miscreants were punishable by solitary confinement. The authorities recruited informers from among the seminarists to stamp out insubordination. Only approved books were allowed into the building. Regular inspections were made of the lockers. The food was plain, and only those who lived in lodgings got relief from a diet heavily reliant on beans and bread. Seminarists went to bed early in the evening and rose early in the morning. The shock to Joseph and his fellow newcomers can hardly be exaggerated. Always in Gori they could come and go as they pleased after school. Rector Germogen’s regime prohibited all that. What made things worse for Joseph was his age. He was already in the second half of his adolescence when he left Gori. Often the Seminary took in boys in their thirteenth year. Being three years older than the normal first-year seminarists, Joseph was less easily malleable.

His biographers have tended to underrate the quality of the curriculum. The reason is the usual one: they have uncritically reproduced what Stalin’s enemies in the revolutionary movement published on the topic. For them, he was an ignoramus with inadequate schooling. Stalin himself reinforced this impression. As a revolutionary he disliked drawing attention to the benefits he derived from the Imperial order. In fact only very bright boys were admitted to the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary and the schooling was pitched at a higher level than in less prestigious ecclesiastical institutions. There were two such seminaries in Tbilisi: one for Georgians, the other for Armenians; they attracted youths who lacked the finance to enter the First Classical Gimnazia. Indeed some parents entered their boys for the seminaries in the knowledge that the course could be used as a qualification to go on to secular higher education.

The curriculum helped to form the person who became Stalin. It was taken for granted that the Russian and Church-Slavonic languages had already been mastered.⁷ Students at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, being the best recruits from the local Georgian schools, were expected to tackle a wide range of subjects. Christian vocational training was not predominant at first: not only Russian literature and history but also Greek and Latin were studied.⁸ Of course, the pedagogy had a political orientation. Secular literature was chosen from works thought to support the Imperial government; and the course in history was based on the textbook by D. I. Ilovaiski, whose priority was to praise the tsars and their conquests.⁹ The standard curriculum required pupils to master Xenophon’sAnabasis and, by the fourth year, to come to terms with Plato’s Apology and Phaedo.¹⁰ Although the curriculum in secular subjects was not as expansive as in the gimnazias it gave pupils a fairly broad education by the European standards of the time.

Joseph started well. In his first-year exams he scored the highest marks in all but one subject:¹¹

His Gori schooling had left him weaker in Greek than in other subjects (and perhaps his late entrance to the Seminary precluded him from starting Latin).

The later years of the Seminary curriculum increased its emphasis on the Christian faith and on practical preparation for the priesthood. In the sixth year Joseph Dzhughashvili had only one weekly period of Greek and no Russian secular literature or history nor any science or mathematics. The gap was filled by ecclesiastical history, liturgy, homiletics, dogma, comparative theology, moral theology, practical pastoral work, didactics and, as before, Holy Scripture and church singing.¹² The curriculum irked the young seminarists. All the allowable works of Russian literature predated Alexander Pushkin. Other banned classics were the novels of Lev Tolstoi, Fëdor Dostoevski and Ivan Turgenev. Georgian poetry and prose were proscribed. Even Shota Rustaveli, the thirteenth-century poet, was prohibited.¹³ National sensitivities and cultural aspirations were affronted by the curriculum and rules of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, and the Rector had no answer other than to reinforce his reliance on surveillance and punishment. As Joseph Dzhughashvili progressed from year to year, his sympathies moved towards those who kicked against the regulations. Intelligent and patriotic, he refused to accept the conditions. Secretly he talked to seminarists who felt the same. Whenever they could, they undermined the imposed regime.

Joseph’s personal development had a long tradition. Within a few years of its foundation the Seminary had given trouble to the authorities. Rebelliousness was constant. Silva Dzhibladze, a future Marxist, was expelled in 1884 for physically assaulting the Rector. Two years later a certain Largiashvili, a seminarist from Gori, went a step further and stabbed the Rector to death.¹⁴ During Lent in 1890, while Joseph Dzhughashvili was still at the Gori Spiritual School, the Tbilisi seminarists went on strike. Bored by the endless meals of beans, they refused to attend lessons unless the diet was changed. Among the strike leaders were Noe Zhordania and Pilipe Makharadze.¹⁵ Zhordania was to become the leader of Georgian Menshevism and Makharadze a leading Georgian Bolshevik. Their demands were expanded to include teaching in the Georgian language and courses in Georgian history and literature. The boycott of classes went on for a week and Zhordania and Makharadze produced a handwritten journal to agitate for sustained support.¹⁶Another food strike broke out in 1893 and led to the expulsion of Akaki Chkhenkeli, Vladimir Ketskhoveli and Severian Dzhugheli. They all became famous as Marxists. Mikha Tskhakaya and Isidore Ramishvili also entered the Marxist movement after leaving the Seminary.¹⁷

The Russian Orthodox Church had become the finest recruiting agency for the revolutionary organisations. Each year the specific complaints of the seminarists were the same: the restricted curriculum, the denigration of Georgian culture, the harsh discipline and the grim meals at Lententide. The antagonism of the priests to all things secular, national and modern was simply counter-productive. Rector Germogen and Inspector Abashidze did Karl Marx’s work for him.

There was no strike in Joseph’s time at the Seminary. But resistance to the rules was systematic and he was quick to join the rebels. Their minds thirsted for intellectual nourishment beyond the menu of the official curriculum. Out and about in the city they found what they wanted. Seminarists feared denunciation if they borrowed disapproved books from the nearby Public Library. Instead they sought out the Iveria and Kvali editorial offices and Zakaria Chichinadze’s bookshop. There they could read and talk about things banned by the priests. Iveria was edited by the poet and commentator Ilya Chavchavadze. While calling for Georgian cultural freedom, Chavchavadze eschewed anything but the mildest demands for social and economic reform. Giorgi Tsereteli’s Kvaliwas more radical. Coming out every Saturday, it attracted contributions from critical intellectuals across a wide range which included both agrarian socialists and Marxists (and in January 1898 Tsereteli handed over the editorship lock, stock and barrel to Noe Zhordania without any political conditions).¹⁸ Zakaria Chichinadze was a socialist sympathiser. Chavchavadze, Tsereteli and Chichinadze had many disagreements while concurring on the need for some reform and for Georgians to struggle to that end. They understood that the key to success lay in their campaign to win the hearts and minds of youths like Joseph.

As editors and publishers they were very enterprising. The Imperial censorship was a patchy phenomenon. Tight and intrusive in St Petersburg, it was slacker in Georgia and Finland. The harsh control over ideas in the Seminary was not replicated outside its walls. Although overtly nationalist works were picked out for attention, pieces on social, economic and historical themes were permitted to appear. Before the turn of the century, moreover, the chief perceived danger to the Romanovs was thought to come from those intellectuals who called for armed struggle, regional autonomy or even secession from the Russian Empire. Chavchavadze offered no direct challenge to the monarchy or the social order. But the Marxists too were deemed to be not unduly menacing since they appeared to be preoccupied with social and economic grievances; none of them demanded Georgian territorial autonomy, far less independence. The chief censor in Tbilisi, Giorgi Zhiruli, cheerfully admitted to his ignorance of Marxism. In such an environment it was possible to have a lively public debate. Marxists in Russia had to content themselves with thick journals published in St Petersburg and with intermittently appearing émigré newspapers.¹⁹ The debate for the soul of the Georgian nation was intense as conservatives, liberals and socialists contended with each other.

Joseph Dzhughashvili was more confident than most first-year seminarists. He had begun to write his own verses, and quickly after arriving in Tbilisi he set about trying to get them published. His themes were nature, land and patriotism. Ilya Chavchavadze appreciated his talent. Joseph’s first printed poem, ‘To the Moon’, appeared in the magazine Iveria in June 1895. Giorgi Tsereteli’s Kvali was no less enthusiastic about his work, and Joseph – writing under pseudonyms such ‘I. Dzh-shvili’ and ‘Soselo’ to avoid detection by the Rector and the Inspector – had six poems published in 1895–6.²⁰

The poem ‘Morning’ was a touching work written in the romantic literary style then conventional in Georgian literary circles:²¹

The pinkish bud has opened,

Rushing to the pale-blue violet

And, stirred by a light breeze,

The lily of the valley has bent over the grass.

The lark has sung in the dark blue,

Flying higher than the clouds,

And the sweet-sounding nightingale

Has sung a song to children from the bushes

Flower, oh my Georgia!

Let peace reign in my native land!

And may you, friends, make renowned

Our Motherland by study!

Nobody would claim that this in translation is high art; but in the Georgian original it has a linguistic purity recognised by all. The themes of nature and nation commended themselves to readers. The educationist Yakob Gogebashvili, who had contacts with revolutionaries in Tbilisi,²² valued the poem so highly that he included it in the later editions of his school textbook, Mother Tongue (deda ena).²³

There was a nationalist edge to Joseph’s poems even though he restrained himself in order to avoid annoying the Tbilisi censor. His images were those of many writers in the oppressed countries of Europe and Asia of that time: mountain, sky, eagle, motherland, songs, dreams and the solitary traveller. The closest he came to disclosing his political orientation was in an untitled work dedicated to ‘the poet and singer of peasant labour, Count Rapael Eristavi’. For Joseph, Eristavi had identified himself with the plight of the poor toilers of the Georgian countryside.²⁴

Not for nothing have the people glorified you,

You will cross the threshold of the ages –

Oh that my country might rise.

Eristavi, born in 1824, was an ethnographer and folklorist as well as poet. His focus on the need for social and economic reform made him an unmistakable opponent of the status quo in the Russian Empire. According to one of Joseph’s fellow seminarists, the poem dedicated to Eristavi was interpreted as revolutionary in content.²⁵ This may be an exaggeration. But Joseph was undeniably offering a work intended to criticise the status quo.

The legend of a rejected Georgian youth was a figment of Stalin’s imagination. He was welcomed by the Georgian cultural elite. As soon as he left Gori, there was no going back except for holidays. Tbilisi offered the promise of realised ambition. His friends, whether they had come from rich or poor backgrounds, felt the same. They had an eagerness to make a mark in the world outside the town of their birth.

Stalin later made out that he and his comrades crept into Chichinadze’s shop and, short of funds, surreptitiously copied out the forbidden texts into their notebooks. Supposedly they did this in relays to relieve the pain to their hands. A less likely situation is hard to imagine in a well-ordered enterprise. (Not that this has stopped biographers from taking the story at its face value.) Chichinadze was on the side of those who opposed the Russian establishment in Tbilisi. When the seminarists came on to his premises, he surely greeted them warmly; and if copying took place, it must have been with his express or implicit permission.²⁶ The spread of ideas was more important to the metropolitan intellectual elite than mere profit. It was a battle the liberals could scarcely help winning. Chichinadze’s shop was a treasure house of the sort of books the youngsters wanted. Joseph Dzhughashvili was fond of Victor Hugo’s The Year Ninety-Three. He was punished for smuggling it into the Seminary; and when in November 1896 an inspection turned up Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, Rector Germogen meted out a ‘lengthy stay’ in the solitary cell.²⁷

According to his friend Iremashvili, the group also got hold of texts by Marx, Darwin, Plekhanov and Lenin.²⁸ Stalin told of this in 1938, claiming that each member paid five kopeks to borrow the first volume of Marx’s Capital for a fortnight.²⁹ Much as they liked Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, they were not in intellectual thrall to them. Some works by Marx and his followers were legally published in the Russian Empire. Others were passed secretly from hand to hand. The Orthodox Church had lost the contest to retain the loyalty of its livelier seminarists in the Georgian capital. The true struggle was among the various political and cultural trends outside the Seminary. Chavchavadze, a conservative reformer, hoped for a revival of national culture; Tsereteli, a radical liberal, aimed at basic socio-economic reform. By the 1890s, though, they were having to compete with advocates of diverse strands of socialism. Marxism was on the rise in Georgia and Joseph Dzhughashvili was already becoming attracted to its tenets.

As his time in the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary drew to an end, Joseph had become thoroughly alienated from the authorities. He had ceased to study hard from his second year when he became involved in writing and publishing.³⁰ He was also drawing back from the world of literature. Despite the patronage of Ilya Chavchavadze and Giorgi Tsereteli, he no longer sought to be a poet. He tossed aside the opportunity to join the Georgian cultural elite. Instead he intensified his studies of socialism, politics and economics. Having hurtled like a small meteor across the Tbilisi literary scene in 1895–6, he just as suddenly disappeared. It would appear that he entirely stopped composing poetry. Few people apart from his publishers and his close friends at the Seminary had an inkling that he had ever published any. (When Yakob Gogebashvili reprinted ‘Morning’ in 1912, it was under the original pseudonym.)³¹ Dzhughashvili searched for a different way of life from the kind offered either by the priesthood or Tbilisi literary circles. His alter ego as a rough-voiced militant from the depths of society was beginning to emerge; and as far as most people knew, this persona was the only Dzhughashvili who existed.

He detested the disciplinary regime at the Seminary. On 28 September 1898 he was the centre of a group found to be reading prohibited material. Joseph had even taken notes on it.³² Inspector Abashidze, exasperated by infringements, reported:

Dzhughashvili, Iosif (V.I.) in the course of a search of the possessions of certain fifth-year pupils spoke out several times to the inspectors, giving voice in his comments to discontent about the searches conducted from time to time among the seminarists. In one of them he asserted that such searches were not made in a single other seminary. In general, pupil Dzhughashvili is rude and disrespectful towards persons in authority and systematically fails to bow to one of the teachers (A. A. Murakhovski), as the latter has frequently reported to the inspectors.

Reprimanded. Confined to the cell for five hours by order of Father Rector.

Joseph’s behaviour was almost asking for trouble and the Rector’s reaction aggravated the tension in the young man. It was only a matter of time before Joseph threw up his priestly vocation.

He stuck it out almost to the end of the course. There were pragmatic reasons for this. A piece of paper attesting completion of the seminary training, even if he declined to enter the priesthood, would have given him the qualifications (if he had the necessary money) to become a student in one of the Russian Empire’s universities. But Joseph had no private source of income and had no connection with any organisation which might support him. He would have to make his living for himself from scratch. Consequently his disappearance from the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary in May 1899, as the last examinations were about to be sat, was an act of existential choice. He left no explanation of his decision to the authorities. In later years he pretended that he had been expelled for carrying out ‘Marxist propaganda’;³³ but the reality was that he had left of his own accord. His was a wilful spirit. He had lost his religious faith and was beginning to discover a different way of interpreting the world in Marxism. He was also impulsive. Joseph Dzhughashvili had had enough: he left the priestly environment on his own terms. Always he wanted the world to function to his wishes. If he left a mess behind him, too bad. He had made his decision.

He abhorred the Imperial authorities. He had national pride. In Tbilisi he responded to the intellectual effervescence of Georgian public life at the end of the nineteenth century. He already considered himself a man of outstanding ability. He had already shown his ambition by getting his poems published.

The contours of Joseph’s later personality were already disclosing themselves. He was dedicated to self-improvement through daily study. His capacity for hard work, whenever he thought such work was useful, was immense. The Imperial order had given him a usefully wide education, albeit an education underpinned by Christian liturgy and tsarist loyalism. He was literate and numerate; he had a pleasing style in poetry. In his spare time he had started to acquaint himself with broader ideas about society and to study Marxist texts. He also read Russian and European classic novels. He was obviously capable of going on to university and had an acute analytical mind. His problem was what to do with his life. Having abandoned Christianity, he had no career ahead of him; and his family lacked the resources and desire to enable him to enter an alternative profession. For the next few years he was to expend much energy trying to decide the fundamental question for rebels in the Russian Empire: what is to be done? Another question also exercised his mind: with whom to do it? Young Dzhughashvili, fresh out of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, had yet to formulate his answers.