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

image he wanted to project—shortly before World War I, for several years he would continue to use the letter “K”
    for Koba before Stalin.10
    Stalin’s mother was determined that her talented and beloved son should become a priest. For that purpose, she managed only with great determination and conviction to have him accepted as a scholarship student at the Georgian Orthodox Seminary in Tiflis. There, in 1894, young Sosa was forced to study Russian subjects in the Russian language under mostly Russian priests, which grated on the making of a genocidaire 39
    him and his classmates. Tiflis was the great multinational center of the western Caucasus. Unlike the provincial backwater of Gori, Tiflis exposed Sosa to the development of political radicalism in the Russian Empire, and the emergence of the working-class movement. It was at the seminary that Soso first read the radical literature that suffused student circles throughout the empire in this period. For the first time, Stalin was introduced to Spencer and Chernyshevskii, Darwin and Marx. Especially crucial for Soso was the potent mixture of Georgian radical literature with the arguments of the Marxists against the populists. Even as the eventual fount of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the Soviet Union and around the world, Stalin never lost his attachment to the Georgian literary tradition he absorbed as a seminary student.
    But soon, too, Stalin would fall in with serious radical groups in the city, where he got involved as a propagan-dist among workers. In 1899 Stalin left the seminary for good to engage full time in social-democratic circles. With the police on his tail, Stalin went underground, moving to Batumi, where he actively organized strike activities. Like many young, educated, and idealistic imperial subjects of the “periphery” (Congress Poland, Georgia, Armenia, or the Pale of Settlement), Stalin was attracted to the growing strength and militancy of the workers’ movement and its social-democratic leadership. Already, Stalin demonstrated a number of character traits as a young revolutionary that persisted throughout his adulthood: intolerance of differing opinions; a penchant for making enemies; and a sullen, private demeanor. Many memoirists from the time 40
    chapter 2
    mention his “wry,” “slight,” or “mocking” smile, as if he knew something they did not and would not reveal it. At the same time he was restrained, quiet, and focused. His long-time associate Lazar Kaganovich remembered: “Stalin was not at all as he is portrayed [today]. . . . I know Stalin from the first period of his work, when he was a modest person, very modest. He not only lived modestly, but he carried himself modestly with all of us.”11
    Between 1902, when he was arrested in Batumi, and the revolution of 1917, Stalin was pursued by the police, was arrested and exiled twice, and lived underground as a social-democratic agitator. For short periods of time he managed to find his way to Europe and St. Petersburg on party business. He spent an especially formative period in Baku from 1907 to 1910, where his exposure to the powerful multinational oil workers’ movement in the city convinced him that open agitation could often be as effective as underground propaganda. Above all, he learned flexibility in his methods and a realistic take on revolutionary opportunities. Dealing with the powerful Baku trade union movement forced him into a number of tactical adjustments. This hard-nosed pragmatism characterized his politics almost until the very end of his life, when he succumbed to the self-absorbed hubris of his old age.
    Stalin’s attachment to Bolshevism and to the radicalism of Lenin came quickly and unambiguously. Everything about Lenin appealed to the young Georgian radical: Lenin’s dedication to a party of professional revolutionaries and to an uncompromisingly revolutionary brand of Marxism; Lenin’s polemical style and intraparty com-the making of a