notes taken as i read "Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928" by Steve Kotkin
Stalin's mother
i love this photo of Stalin's mother, Ekaterine "Keke" Geladze. the round glasses and unusual headware. according to chatGPT it is a "lechaki" (ლეჩაკი), but if you google it the photos don't look quite like this one. she has a great face with so much character
Suliko
Stalin's favorite song. its lyrics, adapted from a poem by Akaki Tsereteli, are written from the perspective of someone who is searching for their deceased beloved Suliko (a unisex Georgian name meaning "soul"). the narrator visits Suliko's grave and asks a nightingale if it knows where Suliko is. the narrator then feels Suliko's presence in the twinkling of the stars, the whisper of the breeze, the smell of the rose. the morose poem ends with this jubilant stanza
Ah, life has meaning once more now!
Night and day, I have hope
And I have not lost you, my Suliko
I shall always return to you, I know now where you rest.
it's a very nice song, with an appropriately bittersweet, melancholy, nostalgic melody. i really enjoyed this rendition by Georgian Voices arranged by Michael Church on youtube
Stalin's hairline
the photo of Stalin on the cover of Kotkin's book demonstrates that Stalin was blessed with a very thick and robust head of hair
i'm reminded of one of my favourite jokes from Seinfeld, in the episode "The Tape" (s03e08) when george orders a baldness curing cream from a company in Beijing over the phone and asks Ping, the chinese restaurant delivery boy, to help translate:
Ping: if you send money, they send cream
George: they send me, alright! ask them: does it really work?
Ping: they say you grow hair. look like Stalin!
Stalin in Siberia
Stephen Kotkin claims that he avoids relying on reminiscences--texts written by people who knew Stalin but only recorded their memories much later--and instead prioritizes contemporaneous accounts as sources for his biography. Kotkin is (reasonably, imo) concerned that reminiscences are biased by the horrific crimes Stalin would later commit. as a result, Kotkin's Stalin is more banal and relatable.
one of my favourite such contemporaneous reports of Stalin's character is from Yankel Sverdlov, a fellow Bolshevik, with whom Stalin spent a couple years while in exile in Siberia:
“My friend [Stalin] and I differ in many ways,” Sverdlov wrote in a letter postmarked for Paris on March 12, 1914. “He is a very lively person and despite his forty years has preserved the ability to react vivaciously to the most varied phenomena. In many cases, he poses new questions where for me there are none any more. In that sense he is fresher than me. Do not think that I put him above myself. No, I’m superior [krupnee], and he himself realizes this. . . . We wagered and played a game of chess, I checkmated him, then we parted late at night. In the morning, we met again, and so it is every day, we are our only two in Kureika.” For a brief time, they roomed together. “There are two of us” in a single room, Sverdlov wrote to his second wife, Klavdiya Novogorodtseva. “With me is the Georgian Jughashvili, an old acquaintance . . . He’s a decent fellow, but too much of an egoist in everyday life.”
When a fellow Siberian exile drowned, Stalin seized the man’s library for himself alone, violating the exiles’ code, and cementing his reputation for self-centeredness. Stalin also continued to engage in the exiled revolutionary’s pastime of seducing and abandoning peasant girls. He impregnated one of his landlord’s daughters, the thirteen-year-old Lidiya Pereprygina, and when the police intervened he had to vow to marry her, but then betrayed his promise; she gave birth to a son, who soon died. (Stalin would later recall his dog in Siberia, Tishka, but not his female companions and bastards.)
Stalin was exiled in Siberia four different times: 1902 (escaped after two months), 1908 (five months), 1910 (nine months), 1912 (38 days) and 1913 (almost four years). the 1910 arrest by the okhranka (russian secret police) was what produced Stalin's famous "sexy mugshot" (which goes viral on my twitter feed every once in a while, usually posted by a young woman along with a comment like "Stalin can hit the back walls" or "Stalin is daddy"):
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| Stalin's "sexy" 1910 mugshot |
during Stalin's 1912 stint in exile Stalin's political career received an unexpected boost, when he was named a member of the new Central Committee (in absentia) by Lenin at a party conference in Prague. the creation of the committee was a naked power-grab; Lenin was effectively asserting control over the entire Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. this was surprising because Lenin had been exiled in Western Europe, and had only met Stalin briefly in 1905. to some extent, Stalin was a "token Georgian" on the committee, selected for factional strategic value. but Kotkin argues that that can't be the whole story, and suggests Stalin's hardcore dedication to the cause had earned him Lenin's respect:
In 1911, Grigol Urutadze, the Georgian Menshevik who had once sat in prison with Jughashvili, poured poison into Lenin’s ear about Jughashvili’ s illegal expropriations and his supposed past expulsion from the Baku organization. “This means nothing!” Lenin is said to have exclaimed. “This is exactly the kind of person I need!”If Lenin said it, he was praising how Stalin recognized few if any limits on what he would do for the cause.
