Read Online Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore - Free Book Online

Casanovas of Georgia. Besides, only someone telling the truth—or a lunatic with a death wish—would havedared to write such a letter to Stalin at the height of the Great Terror. Had Stalin no history of abandoned mistresses and children, one would dismiss this. But henceforth he rarely seems to have been without a girlfriend, and he had no compunction in abandoning fiancées, wives and children. We will never know, but in terms of character and timing, it is plausible. 4
    If such an event was discovered by Father Abashidze or if Keke feared that the seminary was likely to find out, it might explain her role in his leaving. Soso spent the Easter of 1899 at home in Gori, claiming to be sick with chronic pneumonia. Perhaps he really was ill. “I took him out of school,” Keke asserted. “He didn’t want to leave.” But she must have been bitterly disappointed.
    Soso certainly exaggerated the glamour of his expulsion. He was not thrown out for being a revolutionary, and he maintained polite relations with the seminary afterwards. Some biographies claim that he was expelled for missing his exams, but this was forgivable if he was ill. Indeed the Church bent over backwards to accommodate him, letting him off repaying his scholarship (480 roubles) for five years; they even offered him a chance to resit the finals and a teaching job.
    The truth is that Father Abashidze had found a soft way of getting rid of his tormentor. “I didn’t graduate,” Stalin told his Gendarme interrogators in 1910, “because in 1899, absolutely unexpectedly, I was invoiced 25 roubles to proceed with my education . . . I was expelled for not paying this.” The Black Spot cunningly raised the school fees. Stalin did not try to pay them. He just left. Stalin’s friend Abel Yenukidze, another exseminarist who met him at this time, puts it best: “He flew out of the Seminary.” But not without controversy.
    He confided to his Gori friend Davrichewy that he had been expelled after being denounced, which he said was “a blow.” Afterwards, twenty others were expelled for revolutionary activities. Soso’s enemies later claimed that he betrayed his fellow Marxists to the rector. It was said that later in prison he confessed, justifying his treachery by saying he was turning them into revolutionaries: they did indeed become the core of his followers. Stalin was capable of this sort of sophistry and betrayal, but would he have been accepted into the Marxist underground if this had been widely known? Even Trotsky thinks the story absurd. More likely, this was his sardonic answer to an accusation, but it fed the suspicion that he would later become an Okhrana spy. Anyhow, many seminarists were expelled every year.
    Soso the autodidactic bibliophile “expropriated” the books he still kept from the seminary library. They tried to bill him eighteen roubles and another fifteen in autumn 1900, but by then he was underground, forever beyond the reach of the seminary. The Church was never repaid and Black Spot never got his books back. *
    Stalin did not qualify as a priest, but the boarding-school educated him classically—and influenced him enormously. Black Spot had, perversely, turned Stalin into an atheist Marxist and taught him exactly the repressive tactics—“surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings,” in Stalin’s own words—that he would re-create in his Soviet police state.
    Stalin remained fascinated with priests throughout his life and when he met other seminarists or the sons of priests he would often question them carefully. “Priests teach one to understand people,” he reflected. Furthermore he always used the catechismic language of religion. His Bolshevism aped Christ’s religion with its cults, saints and icons: “The working-class,” he blasphemously wrote on being hailed as the Leader in 1929, “gave birth to me and raised me in its own image and likeness.”
    The other irony of the seminary was