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its effect on foreigners such as Franklin Roosevelt, whose secretary recorded that the President—after being thoroughly charmed by Stalin at the 1943 Teheran Conference—was “intrigued that Stalin had been destined for the priesthood.”
    The old God remained a presence in his atheist consciousness. At one of their meetings during the Second World War, he forgave Winston Churchill’s anti-Bolshevism, saying, “All that is in the past and the past belongs to God.” He told U.S. envoy Averell Harriman, “Only God can forgive.” Friends such as Kapanadze became priests, yet Stalin kept in generous contact. He and his grandees sang church hymns during their drunken Bolshevik dinners. He fused Orthodoxy and Marxism by half joking: “Only the saints are infallible. The Lord God can be accused of creating the poor.” But Stalin’s actions always speak loudest: the dictator mercilessly suppressed the Church and murdered and deported priests—until 1943, when he restored the Patriarchate, but only as a wartime gesture to harness old Russian patriotism. *
    Perhaps he revealed his real view of God when he sent his protégé Alexei Kosygin (future Premier under Brezhnev) a gift of fish after the Second World War with this handwritten note: “Comrade Kosygin, here are some presents for you from God! I am the executor of his will! J. Stalin.” In some way, as the supreme pontiff of the science of History, the Tiflis seminarist really did regard himself as the executor of God’s will. 5
    “Do you suppose,” FDR mused several times, “it made some kind of difference in Stalin? Doesn’t that explain part of the sympathetic quality in his nature that we all feel?” Perhaps it was the “priesthood” that had taught Stalin “the way a Christian gentleman should behave.”
    This most un-Christian of gentlemen had moved far from Christianity. Even moderate, noble socialists like Jordania now irritated him and Lado. “They’re conducting cultural and educational activities among workers without training them to be revolutionaries,” Soso complained. He denounced Jordania to his friends, explaining that he had discovered the works of a brilliant new radical named “Tulin,” one of the aliases of Vladimir Ulyanov, who would become Lenin.
    “If there’d been no Lenin,” said Stalin in old age, “I’d have stayed a choirboy and seminarian.” Now he told his friends about this far-off radical. “I must meet him at all costs!” he declared, about to commit himself absolutely to life as a Marxist revolutionary. But he had more immediate problems. Keke “got so angry with him” for leaving the seminary that Soso had to hide a few days in the Gambareuli Gardens, outside Gori, where his friends brought him food. He returned to Tiflis but he soon argued with his roommates, who were supporters of Jordania. He moved out. He had fought with his seminarist friends, then with his roommates, and now he would confront the older radicals of Tiflis. Wherever this rude and arrogant boy went, there was trouble. 6
* Most historians repeat the assertion that Stalin never saw Beso much after 1890, but a reading of several sources in the archive, as well as Candide Charkviani’s memoirs, show he saw his alcoholic father much later.
* In September 1931, his old history teacher, lingering in the dungeons of the Metekhi Fortress-Prison of Tiflis, managed to get an appeal to his old pupil, now the Soviet dictator. Stalin wrote thus to Beria, his Caucasian viceroy: “Nikolai Dmitrievich Makhatadze aged 73 finds himself in Metekhi Prison . . . I have known him since the Seminary and I do not think he can present a danger to Soviet power. I ask you to free the old man and let me know the result.”
* George Gurdjieff, the spiritualist author of Meetings with Remarkable Men , charlatan to some, hierophant magus to others, claimed to have attended the seminary with Stalin, who, he said, stayed with his family in Tiflis. But Gurdjieff, of