Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark Read Free Book Online

Vissarion (Besarion or Beso) Djugashvili, a young, handsome, and rough-hewn shoemaker, and Ekaterina (Keke) Geladze, the intelligent, strong-willed, and pious daughter of Georgian peasants, Stalin grew up amid both the poverty and the religiosity of Georgian urban dwellers of peasant background.
    Some biographers would like to attribute Stalin’s murderousness of the 1930s to the fact that his father was known to have beaten him, sometimes quite brutally. In fact, Beso grew increasingly fond of drink, and by the time he finally abandoned his family in 1890, he had become something of an alcoholic. At the same time, Stalin’s mother was enormously devoted to her young son, especially given the fact that two other children had died in infancy. But the picture of Stalin’s youth is more complicated than that proffered by some of his biographers. His mother was sometimes known to have beaten her son and was very strict with him, while his father was probably not untypical in using physical punishment against his son, especially after having a lot to drink. In neither case does the making of a genocidaire 37
    the explanation of excessive physical abuse stand up to close scrutiny. Stalin himself mentioned to Emil Ludwig in an interview: “My parents were uneducated people, but they treated me not badly at all,” and Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, notes that her father told her: “Fights, crudeness were not a rare phenomenon in this poor, semi-literate family where the head of the family drank. The mother beat the little boy, the husband beat her. But the boy loved his mother and defended her: once he threw a knife at his father.”5
    In fact, young Stalin—Soso, as he was known to his family and friends—cannot be said to have had such an unusual upbringing for the Georgian urban lower-class milieu. He ran with his young friends in the streets of Gori and engaged in fisticuffs and unruly gang behavior, which were common at that time and place. He contracted a bad case of smallpox as a boy, leaving his face permanently scarred with unsightly pockmarks He also limped slightly from injuries sustained after being run over by one car-riage and had a withered left shoulder and arm from being hit by another one. But it is also the case that at the religious school he attended in Gori, he was known as a very fine student and for having a beautiful singing voice. He read a lot and studied hard. Until very late in his life, he continued the habits of an autodidact that he picked up as a boy.6 While some biographers portray young Stalin as a ruffian and thug, mean to animals and always ready for a fight, more characteristic of his youth was a proclivity to romanticism, traditional Georgian song, and poetry. This strong streak of romanticism deepened Soso’s attachment 38
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    to the Georgian national tradition and to the epic songs that were memorized by its youthful adherents.7
    Like an entire generation of disaffected Georgian youth, Sosa recited the verses of Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in Panther’s Skin , a twelfth-century epic poem that glorified Georgian national and heroic traits. One of Stalin’s biographers writes that Stalin took some of his favorite say-ings from Rustaveli, including: “My life is pitiless, like the beast,” and “A close [friend] turned out to be an enemy more dangerous than a foe.”8 Among Stalin’s favorite works were those of the Georgian patriotic writer A. Kazbegi, whose famous epic poem, The Patricide , extolled the virtues and heroism of Koba, the just avenger of the Georgian people. Koba, writes another recent biographer,
    “represented a noble ideal of a man of honor unwilling to submit to injustice.”9 Stalin clearly identified with Koba, adopting the name as his first underground pseudonym in 1903, and a few of his friends called him Koba until the end of his life. Even when he adopted the underground name of “Stalin”—man of steel, a perfect reflection of the