STALIN, his real name Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, was born in 1879 at Gori, Georgia, and not at Didi-Lolo (in reality Didi-Lilo), his grandfather's native place. Trotsky (Leon Davidovich Bronstein) was born in the same year. Most of the leaders of the Russian Revolution of 1917 belong to the generation of the '80's of the last century; Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov) was older by a decade.
Stalin's father, Vissarion, was a peasant like his grandfather, but a handicraftsman as well, as were innumerable kustari peasants in the various provinces of the former Empire. In the Djugashvili family the shoemaker's trade was hereditary, though they remained attached to the soil; and little Joseph would have continued the family tradition but for his father's premature death. According to the official biographer, Vissarion worked at the small Adelkhanov boot factory, at Tiflis, the only town in the neighbourhood. The peasant shoemaker died, leaving an only son of eleven years old. Three other children had died before his birth. His mother, Catherine, died in 1937 at the age of 78, and had lived during her last years at Tiflis in a modest apartment in a socialised mansion, once the residence of the former Viceroy. She was devoted to her only son, and sent him to the church school at Gori, with the idea of making him a parish priest. There young Sosso acquired the rudiments of education, and learned many prayers.
He was Sosso, in accordance with the equalitarian and simple Georgian custom, which transforms names from the calendar into endearing diminutives, and makes general use of the familiar second person singular. A Georgian retains his petname all his life, and many friends would be incapable of saying what were the real Christian names of a Chito or a Zakro, a Valico or a Kote. Among his relatives and friends Stalin therefore remained Sosso.
Gori was a big township on the left bank of the Kura (Greek, Kuros; French, Cyrus), seventy versts from Tiflis, the capital of Georgia and of Transcaucasia. The stream is rapid and abounds in fish; in the Turki language its upper reaches are romantically called "Coral Waters" or "River of Pearls." The "town" had 5,000 inhabitants when Stalin first saw the light of day there; the population is now about twice that figure. When Dubois de Montpéreux visited the place he noted that there was an Armenian majority, "almost all of them artisans and traders," but the proportion diminished substantially later on. There is a Tartar admixture in the Georgians of the valley. Gori lies in the centre of a lacustrine plain, with a fertile soil and a climate favourable to agriculture; its peasants produce good wine and the best wheat in the Caucasus. "Nothing could be more picturesque," writes a traveller, "than the two thousand year old fortress, dominating the town from the summit of an isolated hill in the centre of a plain surrounded by high mountains, among which may be discerned in the distance the snowy summit of Mount Kasbek." The slopes are forest clad. There is no local industry. Eight kilometres away is the troglodyte city of Uplis-Tzikhe, attributed by Greek legend to Ulysses, with the relies of an ancient civilisation in its caves.
Sosso grew up among the Georgian and Tartar peasants of Gori until he was fourteen. In 1893 he entered the Seminary at Tiflis, where the curriculum corresponded roughly to that of a Russian High School, except for the large share allotted to instruction in the Greek Orthodox religion. The seminarists were usually destined for holy orders or for the lower ranks of the clergy. There, apparently, he acquired his knowledge of Old Slavonic, and the ritual phraseology which appeared later in some of his most characteristic writings.
His friend B. Bibineishvili, in memoirs published at Tiflis in 1930 under the title A Quarter of a Century, has devoted a short chapter to him. For Stalin's school-days he uses articles written by old boys of the seminary, Bakuradze and Parkadze, printed in the review Drosha (The Flag) in 1924. From these, however, he gets very little. He says he remembers seeing him riding on the back of their fellow-student Davitashvili and shouting "Ya stal, ya stal" (I am steel). If this story, which cannot be authenticated, is true, then Stalin was very early conscious of his strength. Catherine Djugashvili maintains, erroneously, that her son received his name of Stalin from Lenin. It appears also that Sosso wrote verses of which some were printed under the pseudonym of Sosselo, in Iveria, a local nationalist journal edited by I. Chavchavadze, but the verses have never been reprinted.
There is hardly any reliable information to enable us to judge of his childhood and youth—no recollections of relatives or memoirs of acquaintances, no family papers or private letters, no school notes or boyish essays. All that is available is the guarded confidences of some of his comrades of those days. The brochure of I. Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens, published in Germany, is too suspect to be accepted by serious persons without confirmation of the contents. There is little scope in such a case for the art of the self-styled psycho-analysts who seek the origin of great historical and social events in the adolescence of great men.
Once only, his mother made a statement, a serious one, for publication. "He was always a good boy.... I never had to punish him. He worked hard, was always reading and talking, and tried to understand everything. He went to school when he was eight." This maternal account is flatly contradicted by the accounts already referred to of Bolshevik Georgians who were his school-fellows. They found Sosso hard, insensitive, without consideration for his mother, and adduce rather unpleasant facts by way of proof. But a mother is a mother, and indiscreet boyhood comrades are in prison or in exile.
Sosso did read, but in Georgian, that is to say, folk-lore, fabulous tales which are the foundation of the literature of his native land and no doubt the great epic and lyric poem of Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin. Georgia obstinately resisted Russification, and the people maintained their original language. Even to-day Stalin speaks Russian incorrectly, with a strong Caucasian accent which arouses the rather scornful irony of "real" Russians. Except with a Georgian interviewer his mother required an interpreter. One cannot help thinking of the Corsican Bonaparte, whose mother tongue was Italian and who hated France before he came to govern it, just as the Georgian Stalin was to govern the Russia whose imperial rule he had detested.
His reading and the teaching at school provided him with the rudiments of education; neither have left visible traces in his writings and speeches. In that he is unlike any other notable revolutionary of modern times. The speeches of the outstanding men of the French Revolution constantly reveal their spiritual ancestry by quotations from Montesquieu, from Rousseau and Mably, by references to the heroes and famous stories of Sparta and Rome. The revolutionary idiom of our own day is impregnated with the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with here and there formulae taken from Lassalle and Blanqui, from Proudhon and Bakunin, and their successors, and with references to historical precedents—to Jacobinism, Babouvism, Chartism, the Revolution of 1848, the Commune of 1871. Nothing of the kind with Stalin. The age-long tradition which revives to-day the name of Spartacus finds no expression in his words, even though it is continued in his deeds. Nevertheless from a given moment he neither spoke nor wrote without quoting Lenin at every point, as if he owed everything to one book, a work in twenty volumes—just as Cromwell seems to have read only the Bible. If he should happen to quote another writer it is at second hand, as if to create the impression, unwillingly revealed, of a modicum of erudition.
His compatriot, A. Yenukidze, a high official devoted to his service, says: "Stalin, while still a seminarist, read books on science, sociology, and the working-class movement, but in secret, like a conspirator. In spite of all precautions, his reading was discovered by the vigilance of his monastic directors, and Djugashvili was expelled from the Seminary." It seems very strange that the reading of purely scientific books, all of which had in any case been submitted to the strict Russian censorship, should at that time be considered a crime, even at the Tiflis Seminary; the zealous but clumsy friend here seeks to prove too much. Moreover, Sosso's mother explicitly denies his expulsion: "He was not expelled. I brought him home on account of his health. When he entered the Seminary he was fifteen and as strong a lad as could be. But overwork up to the age of nineteen pulled him down, and the doctors told me that he might develop tuberculosis. So I took him away from school. He did not want to leave. But I took him away. He was my only son." Catherine Djugashvili insists again and again: "He was not expelled; I took him away."
Thus the little information we have about his youth is inexact or contradictory. For those who seek historical analogies at any price, here is one more slight resemblance to Cromwell. One may assume, in both cases, that probably this obscurity hides nothing very important. Stalin's character is comprehensible without a knowledge of its early indications; his work can be estimated without knowing his childish impressions, his early desire for knowledge or any precocious ideas he may have had. He was certainly not haunted by Plutarch's heroes, by the great historical figures which some leaders of men have sought to follow as their model. The work he was one day to do was not the fruit of early meditation, nor the execution of a great premeditated plan. The first factors in his life demanding attention are the peasant psychology of his family and friends; and the basic theological education. The other factors we must seek in the general conditions of the country and the period, in the half-light of the historic past, before tracing more direct influences on his character.
THE Caucasus was known in legend before it entered upon the stage of History. But mythology, geography, ethnology and linguistics were merely a confused and distant memory when the World War shattered established national relations, brought into play the interests of States and coalitions, raised frontier questions once more, and with them interest in the nationality of the inhabitants of the districts involved.
For the purpose of the peace negotiations, rival propagandists hastily improvised instruction for the general public in the past records of forgotten races, raising historical claims that had lain dormant for centuries. As the Russian Revolution brought Caucasian, and especially Georgian, problems to the forefront, short courses of history and geography in pamphlets reinforced current knowledge of legendary history. And of all this, in the minds of the contemporaries of Stalin, what remains?
This is the mythical country of Colchis whither Jason led the Argonauts to secure the Golden Fleece. Some see in this a symbol of the riches of the country, others an allusion to the particles of metal in the sheepskins used to wash the auriferous sands of the Ingur and the Rion. In earlier times the Hebrews had believed that Noah's Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. The Greeks, more especially Aristotle, seem to have been fascinated by the mighty mountain chain of the Caucasus, raising its crests of over 16,000 feet like a natural rampart between two worlds. In it they saw the cradle of their race, the birthplace of civilisation. The Caucasus is the home of the Prometheus myth, the symbol of humanity in revolt handed down the centuries; its adoption by modern revolutionary thought presaged the storm about to break between East and West.
Is the Caucasus part of Europe or Asia? Historians and geographers as far back as Herodotus and Strabo have raised the question. In saying that "It can no longer be doubted that the Caucasus belongs to Asia," Elisée Reclus follows Humboldt, and Humboldt, Pallas. History and ethnography confirm the geological fact. The indigenous races, settled mainly on the southern slopes, belong to the Asiatic world; before the Russian conquest they were linked in every way with Asia Minor and Persia. "By her fauna and flora Transcaucasia belongs to subtropical Asia," writes Reclus, summing up earlier scientific observation. The epithet Asiatic spontaneously applied to Stalin in Russia is correct, apart from the special sense sometimes attached to the word.
The physical geography of the country has been exhaustively described: high mountains and narrow valleys, except for the basin of the Kura which opens out more and more until it reaches the Caspian Sea; steep slopes, rugged escarpments, ravines and precipices, torrents fed by the eternal snows from the glaciers. Magnificent vegetation, especially in the eastern regions, and forests of great variety cover more than half the country in spite of barbarous deforestation. Possibly the vine originated in this region where, according to Jewish tradition, a patriarch first pressed the grapes, and was the first to be drunk with wine. The walnut is said to have originated in the valleys of Imeretia. In no country of the world is there to be found so great a variety of fruit and nut-bearing trees. Hunting has not exterminated a fauna stretching back to far distant times; there formerly could be found the aurochs, lynx, tiger, panther, hyena, brown bear, antelope, eagle, the bearded vulture, and rare birds such as the rosy starling and the blue thrush.
Strabo counted seventy races in the Caucasus, speaking as many languages. According to Pliny there were a hundred and thirty languages in use in the marches of Colchis. The Arabs gave the name Mount of Languages to the great rocky massif whose folds shelter the residue of prehistoric migrations. Even in his time Reclus put the number of dialects and local patois at seventy, but classified them under a few main groups. This variety of language reflects the differentiation of the population into tribes isolated by physical obstacles and the configuration of the country. The common assertion that mountain districts encourage conservatism can be verified in the Caucasus better than anywhere else. For the ethnologist and philologist there is inexhaustible material for controversy. It is agreed that the Georgians (or Kartli), the race to which Stalin belongs, are of Iberian origin; they are sub-divided into Gurians proper, Svanetians, Imeretians, Mingrelians, Khevsurs, Pshavs, Tushes, Lazis, with some Chechens, Ossetes, and Lesghians; yet they have maintained for two thousand years their ethnological entity and the purity of their language. Recent philological studies have attempted to throw light from Georgian sources on the tale of Tristan and Iseult, thus linking the Caucasus with Brittany.
The mixture of races makes it unnecessary to seek for pure racial characteristics in Stalin. The Georgians, surrounded by various remnants of Mongol, Slav, and Aryan populations, have an admixture of Tartars, Persians, Armenians, Kurds and various Mediterranean peoples. On the authority of Herodotus, Maspero mentions the presence in Colchis even of descendants of Egyptians brought there by Sesostris. Summarising the observations made by writers on the Georgians, Reclus has written, in words pregnant with meaning for anyone who knows Stalin: "They are said to have a lower average intelligence than the other Caucasian peoples; sitting side by side in the schools with Tartars and Armenians, they show less facility than these in the study of foreign languages, science, and elocution." But, if we are to accept literally the descriptions of the Georgians as friendly, frank, care-free, straightforward, sociable and peaceable, then it must be supposed that Stalin has a strong infusion of Turki blood, through Kurd or Tartar ancestry. Old socialist militants in the Caucasus assure us that Catherine Djugashvili is an Osse (Ossetinka) and attach great importance to this detail: not only are the Ossetes less subtle and more crude than the Georgians, but Russia has always recruited among them a strong proportion of gendarmes and of convict-guards.
The history of Georgia yields to no other in horror. Twenty-five centuries ago Georgia had reached a higher degree of civilisation than the greater part of Europe. Her Euxine shore had been colonised by the Greeks; then in turn the Jews, the Romans, the Persians, and later, the Genoese left their traces on the country from the Black Sea to the Caspian. As the main land route to Central Asia, the Caucasus was frequently invaded, was conquered by Alexander the Great, was subjected by Mithradates Eupator, and later experienced the destructive tidal wave of the Huns. Christianity became the dominant religion there almost at the same time as in Greece, much earlier than in Europe generally. The Iberian Church formed a point of contact with Byzantium. "... There arose a highly civilised society based on a curious synthesis of Byzantine culture and Arab and Persian influences." This civilisation reached its highest point in the twelfth century, in the reigns of King David and Queen Tamara, during the short respite Georgia enjoyed while the Persians and the Turks were at war. Then the Mongol hordes of Genghiz Khan, followed by those of Tamerlane, put the country to fire and the sword; towns and villages were completely devastated and the inhabitants almost exterminated.
In the next five centuries Georgia was coveted and fought for by her warlike neighbours, invaded many times, dismembered, pillaged, sacked and her population decimated by Persian and Turkish armies, and by raids followed by razzias of human cattle (especially of women intended for the harem). She appealed in vain for Russian protection. Annexation by the Tsars in 1801 put an end to her age-long misfortunes by enabling her to share the unenviable, but relatively endurable, lot of the other peoples of the Russian Empire. Her population had fallen from seven million to one million. For half a century longer a guerilla war was maintained in the higher mountain regions, where Georgian rebels against Russification by force defied the Tsar's troops from their inaccessible retreats, and carried out audacious surprise attacks.
This long series of terrible calamities, alternating with periods of torpor following on massacres, left Georgia poor in spite of her rich natural resources and backward in spite of the antiquity of her civilisation. For strategic reasons the Russians built roads, thus facilitating trade and travel; they encouraged wine-growing, which was not competitive with Russian agriculture, and contributed to repopulation by sending to Georgia soldiers, officials, traders, tourists, and political and religious exiles. A century of peace brought back life to the unhappy country without, however, substantially raising either the standard of education or of living, or improving technical methods.
At the time of Stalin's birth, Reclus wrote: "The ancient method used in the construction of Georgian houses has been maintained for two thousand years. There are whole villages composed of nothing but holes made in the ground and in the rocks, only indicated from the outside by heaps of brushwood on their mud roofs, on which the women sit out in the cool of the evening." In most Georgian towns many houses still have only the traditional mud roofs.
Agricultural implements were rudimentary and ineffective. In 1900 an official report stated: "The Georgian plough is a very large, costly and heavy contrivance, which does not give satisfactory results and demands enormous labour power it must be drawn by from three to four pairs of oxen or buffaloes according to the nature of the soil and other considerations." To provide a team of this kind the peasants form a temporary artel, putting into the common stock one man's plough, another's harness, others' cattle. Their harrow is simply a plank; everywhere the sickle is used for harvesting, and often the harvest is carried on men's backs.
Industry was practically non-existent, mineral riches neglected, transport archaic. The extraction of manganese in the Kutais province and of petroleum at Baku were only just beginning. Domestic industry on a small scale by local artisans covered domestic needs, and sufficed for clothing and weapons. The railway had not yet replaced the ruts of the road dug deep by the heavy arbas drawn by oxen. Tools remained primitive.
The past weighed heavily on the family and social life of the Georgians. Stalin's parents had been serfs, the system not having been abolished in Transcaucasia until about 1865. Some of "the nobility, who have remained great landlords, have not yet lost the habit of treating the peasants as animals subject to their caprice, and the manners engendered by serfdom among the people themselves have not disappeared." The same author, Reclus, in describing the condition of the countryside, says: "In spite of the fertility of the soil of Georgia and the relatively small population occupying the land, the peasants in the Kura valley are mostly very poor, and they possess wretched cattle, scurvy cows, and sheep with wool almost like bristles." Marshy ground and absence of sanitation made vast stretches of country unhealthy.
Even the favoured coast region, the "Caucasian Riviera," was wretchedly poor, and a former Minister of Agriculture, A. Yermolov, wrote in 1907: "To see this lovely country the traveller must journey for hundreds of kilometres through virgin forests and waste land, spend nights in the poor huts of the peasants complaining of their poverty and sometimes dying of fever, listen to the howling of the jackals, hear the complaints of the inhabitants on the ravages of bears and wild boars in their maize fields ... in fact see a country poor and desolate in the midst of luxuriant vegetation." At the other end, descending towards Tiflis, the valley of the Kura, like that of the Lower Araxes, is rendered arid by the scorching winds from Asia; its poverty is not less.
Such was Stalin's environment in his earliest years. He was surrounded by remnants of barbarism, by ruin, desolation, and sometimes famine (there was scarcity in 1891-2 and in 1897-8). Patriarchal traditions and many a mediaeval custom still persisted. Religion laid its powerful hand on a population of which more than three-quarters in all, and a higher proportion outside the towns, were illiterate. "No country in the world is richer in churches," wrote Dubois de Montpéreux. Gori, he adds, "has two large modern churches, a Catholic Church and an Armenian, and other smaller Greek Orthodox Churches, making eight in all." Among other survivals from the Middle Ages, little Sosso would be accustomed to meeting in the mountains Khevsurs, a curious people who wore coats of mail, buckles, arm-pieces, and a whole equipment which induced the belief long held that they were descendants of the Crusaders. There was a feudal touch about the local costume, borrowed from the Cherkesses; it resembled a miniature walking arsenal complete with pistols, dagger, sabre and cartridge belt, now more decorative than useful. The practice of brigandage, kept up by the natural inclination of armed mountaineers to prey on the products of the plain, was maintained in various forms, from highway robbery to political banditry. Gori, says Dubois de Montpéreux, lay at the centre of a district where brigandage was rife. Young Stalin was witness of racial hatreds between Armenians and Georgians, between Tartars and Armenians, fostered by the Russian colonisers in their own interests.
The population, twenty-three to the square kilometre according to the census of 1897, was five parts rural to one urban. The majority were landless peasants, and small farmers on a métayage system, who were exploited by a rural gentry numerous but by no means rich. Narratives of travel in the Caucasus always express the amazement of Western observers at the multitude of the poor landed gentry—a Mingrelian nobleman as inn-waiter, an Imeretian prince as stable boy. In this country princes are as plentiful as game, noted von Thielmann. Another traveller says of the Georgians: "Most of them are at once noble and poor, and this is not the only trait in which they resemble the Spaniards," and to this rather summary estimate he adds some just remarks on the idleness of the indigenous population, their immoderate indulgence in Khaketian wine and their propensity to brigandage: "Young men belonging to the most ancient families have earned on the highroad a reputation which does not injure their standing in society but often ends in Siberian exile." The ownership of five or six hectares of land might carry with it the title of Prince. Artisans, ranking with the peasantry in the country or in the mountains, and with the small shopkeepers in the towns, did not form a well-defined class. Workmen properly so called, few in number, remained attached to their native village. There was neither industrial proletariat nor capitalist bourgeoisie, in the modern sense of those terms. A small intelligentsia and the rank-and-file of the clergy were in close relations with the common people. The handful of nobles of higher rank, the great landed proprietors, attached themselves to the Court at St. Petersburg or became officers in the peasantry in the country or army. The whole structure of society was dominated by the Russian bureaucracy.
Tiflis, when Stalin began his studies there, was a rapidly growing oriental city of some 150,000 inhabitants, with a commonplace European quarter built by the Russians. The Georgians were in a minority, the population including Armenians, Northern and Southern Slavs, Tartars, Persians, Germans, Jews, Greeks and Ossetes. The principal centres of activity were the Persian, Armenian and Tartar bazaars, whose alleys were thronged with a motley Asiastic crowd, through which watercarriers, camels, and donkeys laden with wine-skins and bales of goods pushed their way; on sale were carpets from Persia and Kurdistan, bright-coloured woollens and cottons, pottery and inlaid work, sabres from Daghestan and arms made on the spot. Large-scale trade in the town was in the hands of the Armenian middle-class. The ancient Georgian Tiflis, bearing the stamp of Persian domination, was an unchanged mass of grey terraced houses, intersected by a maze of steep streets with refuse drying in the sun.
YOUNG Stalin certainly could not imbibe new ideas or be subjected to European influence in this mediaeval agglomeration of Western Asia with its manifold religions and national superstitions, in a backward society, with a continuous infiltration of nomads; nor in the administrative and military quarters of the city where the despotic Tsarist bureaucracy was housed in buildings European in style. But he entered a new sphere in the Seminary where, in the course of his clerical studies, he came for the first time into contact with the spirit of revolt.
For the beginning of a tradition of insubordination existed, even under the stern rod of religious discipline, among the students at Tiflis, as elsewhere in "All the Russias." The resistance of the rising generation to the oppression of the old regime, which long retained a purely national character among the population, gradually assumed a liberal and then a socialist colour. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, that is from the date of the Russian occupation of Georgia, subversive ideas had been brought into the country by exiles who had been compelled to live in the confines of the Empire. The policy of brutal Russification adopted by Yermolov, Viceroy of the Caucasus, aroused a popular movement of protest, violently suppressed by Cossack troops. Down to the date of the emancipation of the serfs there were incessant and sanguinary peasant revolts. The Tiflis Seminary became an intellectual centre of the opposition to Russian rule. Finally there appeared the new and decisive factor which was to change the social centre of the revolutionary struggle. In 1867 the first railway in the Caucasus was begun, from Tiflis to the Black Sea.
Capitalism began to penetrate into the Caucasus. In the workshops Georgian peasants who had become unskilled labourers and skilled Russian workmen were fused under the hand of the same management and formed the beginnings of a proletariat. At this period begins the exploitation of manganese at Chiaturi, and of naphtha at Baku. Transcaucasia emerged from its provincial isolation, and was dragged from the rut of primitive economic life into the highway of capitalist production.
In 1873, twenty years before the arrival of Stalin at Tiflis, there had been trouble at the Seminary, where the students felt their national pride was offended. Many students, expelled in consequence, returned to their villages to become propagandists of advanced ideas. Ten years later there was a revolt on a small scale in the same school. The Rector spoke in contemptuous terms of the Georgian language, and a student rose and struck him. This youth, Sylvester Djibladze, was conscious of the support of his fellow-students and even of the Georgian teachers, He was condemned to three years in a disciplinary corps, and the Seminary was closed. In 1886 the Rector, the arch-priest Chudnietsky, was stabbed to death by a seminarist aged nineteen. "Scarcely half the students condemn the crime, and many hardly conceal their wicked delight," wrote the Exarch of Georgia to Pobiedonostsev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod. "The Russian teachers are demoralised; the Georgian teachers assume a fierce manner. Some go so far as to excuse the assassin; all in their heart of hearts approve." The Seminary was closed once more. Each time more students were scattered among the villages, propagating their burning convictions.
At this point the second section of railway was completed, from Tiflis to the Caspian Sea. The line crossed Caucasia from west to east, by the valleys of the Rion and the Kura, parallel with the main mountain chain, connecting the Black Sea with the Caspian, Baku with Batoum. The petroleum industry, provided with new means of transport, received a great impetus; a production of 800,000 metric tons in 1883 increased to 1,370,000 metric tons in 1885, and continued to increase. The proletariat of the petroleum wells and the railway grew in proportion. That same year the first socialist groups were constituted, under the leadership of pupils of the Seminary, and composed mainly of Georgian or Russian intellectuals in exile; among the foremost were Sylvester Djibladze, Noah Jordania, Nicholas Chkheidze and Ninoshvili. This was the first "cell" of Georgian Social-Democracy. The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels was translated; the Caucasian rebels set themselves to study European ideas.
On arriving at Tiflis in 1893, therefore, Stalin found the germ of a revolutionary socialist movement, and before long faint echoes of ferment among the workers penetrated the thick walls of the Seminary; the first railwaymen's strike at Tiflis occurred in 1896. The class struggle became more important than the national struggle. The Georgian question gave way to the social question. Tiflis railwaymen, Baku oil-workers and Chiaturi miners were all directed from one centre. Moreover, the general unrest among the proletariat throughout Transcaucasia was now not merely a local incident. The gigantic massif of the Great Caucasus, which had in the course of centuries prevented so many invaders from reaching the steppes, and had retained so many migrant peoples in its hollows, could no longer resist the solidarity created by the bonds of capital and the workers' lot. By force of circumstances Caucasian revolutionaries became a detachment of the great army of revolutionary socialism taking shape in Russia in the school of struggle.
Speaking of the origin of his conversion to socialism, Stalin one day said: "I became a Marxist thanks so to speak to my social position—my father was a worker in a shoe-factory and my mother was also a working-woman—but also because I could hear the murmurs of revolt among the people who lived at the social level of my parents, finally on account of the rigorous intolerance and jesuitical discipline so cruelly crushing me in the orthodox Seminary where I passed some years." And he added: "The atmosphere in which I lived was saturated with hatred against Tsarist oppression and I threw myself with all my heart into revolutionary activity."
In 1898, when Catherine Djugashvili took her son away from the Seminary, which was seething with councils and clubs of all shades of opinion, Sosso was caught in the current which swept with it the more active of his contemporaries. Like other self-taught socialists, he read propagandist pamphlets, abstracts, drafts, schemes. That was sufficient for membership in the Tiflis Social-Democratic group. In the workshops of the railway where had laboured the manual worker, Alexis Peshkov, to be one day celebrated under the name of Maxim Gorky, Stalin came into contact with the proletariat. Some years earlier he might have met among them the locksmith. Serge Alliluyev, and two years later, the lathe-worker, Michael Kalinin. This was the time when the pioneer workmen's clubs, the clandestine krujki, which had been springing up throughout Russia in the last twenty years, were taking steps to form a general organisation, with a single directing centre. In that year there was a small meeting of nine delegates at Minsk, who boldly called themselves a "Congress of the Russian Workers' Social-Democratic Party." In one of the Ukrainian provinces, near Nicolayev, a youth of Sosso's age had already been arrested, transferred from prison to prison and was awaiting deportation to Siberia; this was the future Trotsky. And in Eastern Siberia an exile aged twenty-nine was engaged on a learned work on the development of capitalism in Russia; he was writing an essay on the "economic romanticism" of Sismondi and his followers and translating the History of Trade Unionism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb; this was the future Lenin.
Nascent Russian Social-Democracy had embarked on its life and death struggle with Tsarism. And with the quiet resolution of the volunteers for civil war, Sosso had enrolled himself in the ranks of the new party, the Russian section of the international working-class movement; this was the future Stalin.