Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Free Book Online

Stalin was caught reading another forbidden book “on the school stairs” for which he received, “on the Rector’s order, a prolonged stay in the punishment cell and severe reprimand.” He “worshipped Zola,” his favourite of the Parisian’s novels being Germinal . He read Schiller, Maupassant, Balzac and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in translation, Plato in the original Greek, Russian and French history—and he distributed these books to the other boys. He adored Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Chekhov, whose works he memorized and “could recite by heart.” He admired Tolstoy “but was bored by his Christianity,” later in life scrawling “ha-ha-ha!” beside Tolstoyan musings on redemption and salvation. He marked up heavily a copy of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece on revolutionary conspiracy and betrayal, The Devils . These volumes were smuggled in, strapped under the surplices of the seminarists. Stalin later joked that he had to “expropriate”—steal—some of these books from the bookshop for the sake of the Revolution. 3
    Hugo was not the only writer who changed Stalin’s life: another novelist changed his name. He read Alexander Kazbegi’s forbidden novel The Patricide , which starred a classic Caucasian bandit-hero called Koba. “What impressed me and Soso,” writes Iremashvili, “were the works of Georgian literature which glorified the Georgians’ struggle for freedom.” In the novel, Koba fights against the Russians, sacrificing everything for his wife and country, then visiting a terrible vengeance on his enemies.
    “Koba became Soso’s God and gave his life meaning,” says Iremashvili. “He wished to become Koba. He called himself ‘Koba’ and insisted we call him that. His face shone with pride and pleasure when we called him ‘Koba.’” The name meant a lot to Stalin—the vengeance of the Caucasus mountain peoples, the ruthlessness of the bandit, the obsession with loyalty and betrayal, and the sacrifice of person and family for a cause. It was a name he already loved: his “substitute father” Egnatashvili’s first name was Koba, short for Yakov. “Koba” became a favourite nom de révolution and nickname. But his intimates still called him Soso. 4
    His poems were already appearing in the newspapers but at seventeen, in the autumn of 1896, Stalin started to lose interest in priestly studies and even in poetry. In his year, he slipped from fifth to sixteenth.
    In hushed voices after lights-out, keeping a lookout for the dreaded Black Spot, the boys vigorously debated the great questions of existence. In his seventies, the dictator was still chuckling about these arguments. “I became an atheist in the first year,” he said, which led to arguments with other boys such as his pious friend Simon Natroshvili. But, after some thought, Natroshvili “came to see me and admitted his mistake.” Stalin was delighted until Simon continued: “If God exists, hell exists too. There’s always a blazing hellfire. To keep the hellfires burning, who can provide enough logs? They would have to be endless and how can endless logs exist?” Stalin remembered, “I burst out laughing! I thought Simon had reached his conclusions by philosophical reasoning but actually he became an atheist for fear that there weren’t enough logs for hell!”
    Now Soso moved beyond mere sympathy towards outright rebellion. Just at this time, his uncle Sandala, Keke’s brother, was killed by the police. Stalin never mentioned this but it must have played its part.
    Stalin was “like quicksilver,” moving from French novelists to Marx himself: the boys paid five kopecks to borrow Das Kapital for a fortnight. 5 He tried to study German so that he could read Marx and Engels in the original, and English too—he had a copy of The Fight of the English Workers for Liberty . This was the start of a lifelong effort to learn foreign languages, especially German and English. *
    Stalin and Iremashvili were soon creeping