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January 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023
At the same time, the Soviet state had a more modern and ideologically infused authoritarian institutional makeup than its tsarist predecessor,
WORLD HISTORY IS DRIVEN BY GEOPOLITICS.
In 1719, Russia had no Jews,
But for all the historical attention focused on Russia’s 5 million Jews, it was Russia’s Muslims, present going back to ancient Muscovy, who constituted the empire’s second largest religious grouping after Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Caucasus. These formidable mountain redoubts, wedged between the Black and Caspian seas, were higher than the Alps, but on either side of the chain, adjacent to the seashores, could be found narrow, easily passable lowlands—paths to conquest.
In other words, the Russian advance into the Caucasus proceeded vertically, in essence a giant flanking maneuver around and then up the mountains that consumed more than 150 years and uncounted lives.
These deportations and massacres, accompanied by Slavic peasant homesteading, facilitated Russia’s assimilation of the Caucasus, which is how the future Stalin would be born a subject of Russia.
Such is empire: a series of bargains empowering the ambitious.
The upshot was that whereas in Tiflis one in fifteen inhabitants attended school—versus one in thirty for the entire Caucasus—in Gori one in ten inhabitants were in school.18 For boys born on that “hill,” doors could open to the future.
Stalin’s father, Besarion Jughashvili (1850–1909),
By 1870, all of Siberia was secured by just 18,000 troops, but Kharkov, Odessa, and Kiev garrisoned 193,000 soldiers; Warsaw, another 126,000. At a time when British India counted 60,000 troops and 1,000 police, the Caucasus had 128,000 imperial soldiers.
Ketevan “Keke” Geladze,
Stalin's mother
Georgian nobility, which accounted for 5.6 percent of Georgia’s population, versus 1.4 percent for nobles in the empire as a whole.
Georgia had many elites
Beso, like most Georgians—literate or illiterate—could quote from Shota Rustaveli’s twelfth-century The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, an epic about three chivalrous friends who rescue a damsel from being forced into a marriage.
For all his typical faults, though, Keke viewed the artisan as a step up.
In December 1878, four years into the marriage, when Keke was around twenty and Beso twenty-eight, the couple had a son, Ioseb—the future Stalin.
Ioseb was actually Beso and Keke’s third son, which by Georgian and Eastern Orthodox tradition was viewed as a special gift of God. But their prior children had not survived.
Stalin’s life, in other words, began in a basement.
She also produced insufficient milk, so Soso had to suck the breasts of their neighbors: Mrs. Egnatashvili as well as neighbor Masho Abramidze-Tsikhitatrishvili.
German unification and its follow-on rapid industrialization radically altered Russia’s geopolitical space.
Japan’s new leaders decided to take full advantage, adapting elements of each country separately: the centralized educational system of France appealed to them more than the looser American one, but instead of the French army, they eventually chose the German system of professional officers and a general staff, while opting for a British-style navy.
Moreover, Japan’s follow-on industrialization did not match Germany’s.
Had an independent agrarian nation been victorious and consolidated in the U.S. South—one of the largest slave systems in the modern world—the British would have been doomed in the twentieth century, and the entire course of world events would have been radically altered.
Whoever was at fault, the result was a broken home.
The same year his father left, little Soso contracted smallpox during an epidemic
his face was permanently scarred, and he got tagged with the moniker “Poxy” (Chopura).
Soso’s left elbow and shoulder began to develop abnormally, reducing the use of his left arm.
Keke’s scheming worked, thanks also to Soso’s own ambitions.
Rather, what stood out were his bookworm and autodidact tendencies,
But the accident permanently inhibited the future Stalin’s gait, leading to a second derogatory nickname—“Crimped” (Geza).
Unlike Beso, Keke was always ready to do whatever it took to make sure he had clothes on his back and his bills were paid.
The Patricide (1882),
In the story, a peasant boy, Iago, and a beautiful girl, Nunu, fall in love, despite family disapproval, but a Georgian official collaborating with the Russian empire rapes Nunu and imprisons Iago on trumped-up charges. Iago’s best friend, Koba, a brave, laconic mountaineer (mokheve), swears an oath of revenge—“I’ll make their mothers weep!”—and organizes a daring prison break for Iago. The Georgian official’s men, however, kill Iago. Nunu dies from sorrow. But Koba vows revenge, hunts down and executes the arrogant official—“It is I, Koba!”—enforcing rough justice. Koba is the novel’s only
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Koba (meaning the indomitable, in Turkish)
Too much has also been made of the violence in Soso Jughashvili’s early life.
Beso had never gotten off the rolls of his village commune in Didi Lilo and, therefore, he remained a member of the peasant estate—a juridical status that Beso passed on to his son (as recorded on Stalin’s tsarist internal passports right through 1917).
he himself, thanks to the support of Keke and “Uncle” Yakov, was rising up, into the demi-intelligentsia.
In biography generally, the trope of the traumatic childhood—an outgrowth of the spread of Freudianism—came to play an outsized role.
The future Kremlin leader experienced nothing of the bloody intrigues of the court childhoods of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great (to both of whom he would often be compared).
The young Ivan took to tearing off birds’ wings and throwing cats and dogs off buildings.
Still, the Georgians—no more than a quarter of the urban population—were to an extent upstaged in their own capital.
Outside powers rely on Georgian elites to maintain control
Persians went about in caftans and black-fur caps, their hair and fingernails dyed red.
Imported to Georgia in the 1880s, Marxism seemed to offer a world of certainties.
A headstrong twentysomething militant, Vladimir “Lado” Ketskhoveli (b. 1876) would serve as the revolutionary mentor for the future Stalin, who in looking back would call himself a disciple of Lado.
The regimentation for the teenage seminarians accustomed to indulgent families and the free play of the streets had to be frustrating, but the seminary also offered endless opportunity for passionate discussions with fellow students about the meaning of existence and their own futures, as well as the discovery of books and learning.
This ended badly for Russia and Eastern Europe
Because classroom seating was determined by academic results, his desk kept being moved farther from the teachers.
But the main cause of his declining interest and performance stemmed from a culture clash brought on by modernizing forces and political reactions.
Hitler would graduate (barely) and in 1905 move to Vienna, where he would fail to get into art school and lead a bohemian existence, jobless, selling watercolors and running through his small inheritance. The German nationalism, however, would stick. By contrast, the future Stalin would exchange his nationalism, that of the small nation of Georgia, for grander horizons.
Seid Devdariani.
Killed by Beria
Jughashvili, for his part, might well have lost his interest in holy matters as a matter of course, but the seminary’s policies and the monks’ behavior accelerated his disenchantment, while also affording him a certain determination in resistance.
