Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Free Book Online Page B

arrested, he was interrogated by the Gendarme captain Lavrov, who asked him: “Know any Georgian seminarists?” 8
    The romantic poet was becoming the “convinced fanatic” with a “quasimystical faith” to which he devoted his life and from which he never wavered. But what did he really believe?
    Let him explain in his own words. Stalin’s Marxism meant that “the revolutionary proletariat alone is destined by History to liberate mankind and bring the world happiness,” but humanity would undergo great “trial and suffering and change” before it achieved “scientifically proven socialism.” The heart of this providential progress was “the class struggle: Marxism is the masses whose liberation is the catalyst for the freedom of the individual.”
    This creed was, says Stalin, “not only a theory of socialism: it’s an entire worldview, a philosophical system”—like a scientifically proven religion—of which these young revolutionaries were part. “I had the feeling,” explained Trotsky, “I was joining a great chain as a tiny link.” Trotsky, like Stalin, believed that “the lasting thing is gained through combat.” Blood, death, conflict were essential: “Many storms, many torrents of blood,” in Stalin’s own words, would mark “the struggle to end oppression.”
    There was one big difference between Stalin and Trotsky then: Stalin was a Georgian. He never lost his pride in Georgia as a nation and a culture.The little nations of the Caucasus all found it hard to embrace real internationalist Marxism because their own repression made them also dream of independence. Young Stalin believed in a blend of Marxism and Georgian nationalism, almost opposed to internationalist Marxism.
    Soso, poring over his Marxist texts, was rude and truculent to the priests, but he was not yet in open revolt as other seminarists were, before and after him. His own propaganda later exaggerated the precocity of his becoming a revolutionary, but he was far from the first of his generation to become the real thing. So far he was a schoolboy radical just dipping his toes into revolutionary waters. 9
* Stalin was immersed in Georgian poetry: he loved Eristavi; Chavchavadze was “a great writer with a huge role in the freedom movement of Georgia;” and he enthused about Akaki Tsereteli: “My generation learned the poems of Tsereteli by heart and with joy . . . beautiful, emotional and musical, he’s rightly called the nightingale of Georgia.” But, looking back, Stalin also measured these poets politically, saying Tsereteli wrote “beautiful poems but ideologically primitive and parochial.” Stalin was not the only poetical future Bolshevik: at exactly the same time, at his school in Odessa, young Leon Bronstein, the future Trotsky and near contemporary, was also writing poems. Trotsky far outstripped Stalin as a writer but not as a poet. If any of Stalin’s colleagues had dedicated a poem to a prince, it would have been used against them in the Terror. In 1949, for Stalin’s official seventieth birthday, the Politburo magnate Beria secretly commissioned the best poetical translators, including Boris Pasternak and Arseni Tarkovsky, to create a Russian edition of the poems. They were not told the author of the poems but one of the poets thought “this work is worthy of the Stalin Prize first rank,” though perhaps they had guessed the identity of the young versifier. In the midst of the project, they received the stern order, clearly from Stalin himself, to stop the work.
* “A hasty visit, especially if ladies are of the party,” suggests Baedeker, “is best made by carriage . . . Public safety is on a somewhat unstable footing; it is well to avoid travelling alone or the exhibition of much money (for permission to carry a revolver see earlier). It is advisable to keep a sharp lookout on one’s belongings as natives are not averse from picking up unconsidered trifles.” Baedeker adds that even a letter of