| Stalin, Man of the Borderlands | The American Historical Review, 106.5

Stalin, Man of the Borderlands

ALFRED J. RIEBER

We know what Heaven and Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King.

Rudyard Kipling, "The Ballad of the King's Jest."

In his memoirs, the Georgian Menshevik émigré Grigorii Uratadze described Joseph Stalin, whom he had known in the days of their revolutionary activity in the Caucasus, as "a man without a biography."¹ The assertion was not without foundation, and little has changed in the intervening years to alter Uratadze's judgment. Up to the moment when Stalin emerged as a leading figure in the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government in 1917, the details of his personal and political life remain skimpy and much disputed.² But there is more to the mystery of Stalin than the absence of reliable documentary evidence on his early life. The information about himself that he allowed to be made public in his own lifetime contains an unresolved paradox. On three occasions—in 1937, when a large exhibition of Georgian art in Moscow portrayed Stalin's early career in Transcaucasia—in 1939, when the documents on his early life appeared—and in 1946, when the early volumes of his collected works containing the Georgian writings were published—the propaganda apparatus widely publicized Stalin's Georgian identity at the very time it was beating the drums of Great Russian nationalism. At the height of the election campaign to the Supreme Soviet under the new Soviet constitution, a large exhibition of Georgian paintings opened at the Tretiakov Gallery, featuring as one of its main themes the history of the Bolshevik organization, with paintings of high points in Stalin's Transcaucasian career.³ Two years later, the leading journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Molodaia Gvardiia, published an eighty-page compilation of sources entitled "Childhood and Youth of the Leader: Documents, Memoirs, Stories," which dealt exclusively with Stalin's Georgian roots.⁴ In 1946, the first volumes of Stalin's Collected Works began to appear, consisting mainly of handouts and brief programmatic statements that hardly seem worth mentioning, let alone immortalizing. To be sure, they established Stalin's early revolutionary credentials. But this trivia also reminded the party and the public that up to the age of twenty-eight Stalin had written and published exclusively in Georgian.⁵ 1

     Stalin could not escape his ethnic origins. His heavily accented Russian betrayed him as a man of the borderlands. Self-consciousness about his pronunciation affected the way in which he dropped his voice in conversation. There were jokes about his accent even among Georgians, albeit his enemies. Leon Trotsky inflated Stalin's shaky Russian into something more sinister. In later days, his faithful translator, Oleg Troyanovskii, found it anachronistic to give a literal rendering of Stalin's words, "we Russians," and substituted "we Soviets."⁶ Stalin could not deny his Georgian identity, but why advertise it? 2

     Although the material in Molodaia Gvardiia and the Collected Works may not be entirely accurate, reliable, or complete, it is not without value as a historical source. It was, after all, assembled under Stalin's personal guidance.⁷ As such, it may serve to illuminate two processes at work. Stalin is here engaged in shaping, indeed, controlling the presentation of his own image to the world at large, of reinventing himself in such a way as to endow his life with a powerful political symbolism. At the same time, his selective texts offer clues to the ways in which he sought to reconcile his self-presentation with his political aspirations.⁸ In order to resolve the paradox, then, it becomes necessary to take a new approach to Stalin's biography. 3

The aim of this essay is to explore how the politics of personal identity became the foundations of a Stalinist ideology and a homologue for the Soviet state system. Most previous treatments of Stalin fall roughly into three, often overlapping, categories: Stalin as a "great man," as a pathological criminal, and as a bureaucratic despot.⁹ Common to all is the interpretation that Stalin desired to become Russian and that he carried out a policy of unremitting russification. No full-scale biography of Stalin can neglect any one of these elements. My approach follows a different trajectory. It takes as its point of departure the literature on identity formation in order to explore the relationship between Stalin's struggle to transform and present his self and his solution to the central problem of the Bolshevik revolution: how to construct a centralized polyethnic state on a proletarian class base.¹⁰ 4

     This approach requires a tripartite strategy: to examine Stalin's representation of self not only from the perspective of 1939 but throughout the entire process of his identity formation during his years as a rebellious youth and putative revolutionary; to explore the ways the social and cultural matrix of the Caucasus may have shaped his beliefs, attitudes, and politics in his formative years; and to undertake a rereading of his political writings as a function of the transformation of his persona within the revolutionary movement in order to gain insights into his subsequent policies as the leader of the Soviet Union. The unifying theme that I use to link all three approaches is the concept of Stalin as "a man of the borderlands." 5

     In this sense, Stalin represents a new type of political leader that emerged from the wreck of empires and the discrediting of the traditional elites following the wars and revolutions of the early twentieth century. In the old regimes, the primary ethnic and regional identities of these future leaders were peripheral to the traditional power centers. Their political goals were to build or rebuild the state in order to legitimize their role as leaders of a new type. The nature of their origins also disposed them to suspect conventional forms of nationalism. In a period of political and social uncertainty, they sought to reconstruct in radical ways both state and society in order to locate themselves at the symbolic and real centers of power. Their individual prescriptions varied according to local circumstances and historical precedents, ranging from Adolf Hitler's racial state, to Josef Pilsudski's revival of the Jagellonian federation, Gyula Gömbös's identification with Greater Hungary and repression of his own Swabian minority, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's supra-national Christian fascism.¹¹ Stalin's aims were just as complex and perhaps even more difficult to achieve. Surely he had a longer distance to travel from his borderland to the center of power. 6

     In tracing the individual contours of Stalin's identity formation, this essay utilizes both a metaphor and an analytic category. The metaphor derives from the work of the Polish émigré sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who uses it in a different context to suggest journeys across space and time that involve more than physical movement. The analytic category stems from the work of the American sociologist-anthropologist Erving Goffman, who developed the concept of "frame analysis" as a way of organizing experience that involved "two basic replicating processes." One is a systematic form of transforming reality into a copy, or interpretive scheme. The other fabricates this process, in part or in totality, for improper ends. In this essay, framing serves a dual function: it enables us to analyze Stalin in terms of what he makes of himself and what we can make of him. 7

     The trajectory of Stalin's political career from youthful rebel to revolutionary, state-builder, and imperialist followed an irregular course that transported him from the periphery to the center of the Russian Empire. It was a rough and tumble journey across a "space without contours," where "the trails are blazed by the destination of the pilgrim and there are few other tracks to reckon with."¹² There were no forerunners to emulate and few guidelines to follow. Along the way, the young Iosif (Soso) Djugashvili traversed immense distances in the process of identity formation. It has been argued that "the 'people' themselves play the part of theoreticians in this field."¹³ But it should be added, not always in the end the way they want. Stalin's case was not exceptional. Despite his greatest efforts, carried to the monstrous extreme of physically eliminating those who could contest the veracity of his acquired identities, he was unable to complete the metamorphosis, to shed entirely the mental habits, cultural outlook, and even the literary evidence of his formative years. His attempt to cross the wide frontier between two competing ethnic identities—the Georgian and the Russian—left him suspended, politically triumphant but personally isolated. 8

     Few travelers across the terrain of ethnic transformation have escaped the confusions of cultural ambivalence. As a general rule, ethnic identities are complex and shifting phenomena, which may be experienced differently by different members of what is assumed to be an ethnic group and may be shaped by socioeconomic structures. So, too, are they perceived differently by those observing the process from different vantage points.¹⁴ But Stalin's self-presentation also involved his reconciling and integrating the conflictual components of the geography, community, and class that shaped his existence from the day of his birth. 9

     In Stalin's case, it is possible to utilize frame analysis to illuminate how he constructed a social identity that would achieve particular political ends, and as a mode of analysis to uncover the sources of his multiple identities. In other words, for the purposes of scholarship, framing can serve as a critical mode of analyzing "the master builder" at work.¹⁵ Applied to the material in Molodaia Gvardiia, it explains how Stalin's life experiences may be organized in three interpretive frames: the cultural (traditional Georgian), the social (proletarian), and the political (hegemonic Russian). It is important for my argument to stress that these frames are social constructs and do not signify essentialist values or attitudes. As in most cases of multiple identities, each one contains its own set of ambiguities; all compete and at times conflict with one another. 10

     There is no denying that the inner part of each frame, what Goffman calls "untransformed reality," was constructed out of documentary evidence, however selective. But the outer rim was fashioned by an elaborate "layering of fabrications" composed of arbitrary slices of real and fictive actions. They constituted a set of puzzles for those who had to re-transform the stream of activity into official biographies.¹⁶ Once in power, Stalin consciously manipulated the same technique of "heavy layering" by constructing ideological pronouncements in such a way as to suggest the possibility of multiple interpretations. The "correct" one was never clear, and it could change over time. For example, Stalin could arrange ritualistic intra-party diskussia on any issue, including his own writing. This enabled him to give the appearance of open debate, while reserving for himself the right to intervene at a critical moment as the master interpreter and thus reaffirm his supreme authority.¹⁷ 11

The material in Molodaia Gvardiia supplies abundant references to Stalin's embeddedness in Georgian traditional culture. Lengthy excerpts from contemporary ethnographic material describe in great detail the types of Georgian rattles, baubles, and toys that amused infants at the time of Soso Djugashvili's birth. His mother was reputed to possess a musical voice and to be a "great master at reciting folk tales and legends of the oral tradition." Examples are given of the nursery rhymes of Akakii Tsereteli and the poetry of Rapiela Eristavi, classical Georgian poets, which presumably filled young Soso's ears. Later, he was allegedly renowned for his own recitations of shairi, the sixteen-syllable poetic form used after the time of the great Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli for presenting epics of old Georgian literature.¹⁸ 12

     Only recently has the significance of the oral tradition been appreciated by historians as a source of creating myths to live by in societies which are still in the transition to a written culture, such as Georgia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.¹⁹ In legendary accounts, according to Albert Bates Lord, "the birth of a god or hero was important because it explained his special powers and characteristics. Narratives of his childhood deeds gave early evidence of his extraordinary personality and strength, proving his divine, or at least 'different' origin." Was not Stalin in 1939 not only rehearsing his own debt to this tradition but in fact also creating a new legend in the same spirit? Lord continues: "In some cultures in many parts of the world the biographical scheme in oral-traditional literature plays a very large role, second only to creation myths and sometimes intertwined with them. The miraculously born and magically equipped god or hero creates order from chaos, thus establishing the cosmos and he also overcomes monsters that would destroy the universe and return humanity to chaos and death."²⁰ 13

     According to the documents in Molodaia Gvardiia, the young Djugashvili did not discard the Georgian culture of his childhood when he began to learn Russian and to attend school, where he led the choir in performances of Russian folk songs and the works of D. S. Bortnianskii, P. I. Turchaninov, and Tchaikovsky, or even after he entered the Tbilisi Seminary, the Caucasian cradle of revolutionaries.²¹ As they portray him acquiring the rudiments of a Russian identity, they emphasize nonetheless his deep immersion in the great works of Georgian national literature. 14

     During his school years, according to the selected reminiscences of his contemporaries, Soso Djugashvili devoured the writings of the Georgian critical realists, Ilia Chavchavadze and Akakii Tsereteli. Their form of social protest was influenced by the Russian radicals of the 1860s, but they also vigorously promoted Georgian language and culture in the face of the Russian government's efforts to denigrate it.²² He is also credited with reading Georgian neo-Romantics such as Aleksandr Qazbegi (Kazbek), whose idealized tale of resistance to the Russian conquest, The Patricide, made such an impression that Soso much later adopted the name of the avenging bandit hero, Koba, as a revolutionary pseudonym.²³ 15

     The tradition of social bandits in Georgia was a recent invention of the mid-nineteenth century. In Qazbegi's stories, it took the form of the independent mountaineer fighting to defend his craggy land.²⁴ But there were many other examples. Chavchavadze's famous poem "The Bandit Kako," in which the hero took blood revenge for his father's death by killing the guilty landowner, was, according to one of the sources in Molodaia Gvardiia, the most beloved poem of the schoolboys in Stalin's hometown. Another tale related by a different source in the same collection places young Soso at the scene of the execution of two well-known social bandits, peasants who had escaped from the exploitation of their landlord into the forests and mountains, robbing only landowners and helping the poor.²⁵ The tales of social bandits built on the medieval epic tradition in Georgian literature exemplified by the poetry of Shota Rustaveli. Emblematic of this tradition was a code of courage, loyalty, and patriotism.²⁶ Illustrative examples in the form of twelve aphorisms from Rustaveli's work were reprinted by the editors of Molodaia Gvardiia. One can only assume that these were among Stalin's favorites. The dominant trope of dichotomies, favored by Stalin, is of friends and enemies, trust and disloyalty, which can be interpreted in two ways: as proofs applied to one's own conduct or to that of others. Consider, for example, what a temperamentally suspicious man might make of the salutary warning: "the kinsman of a foe is dangerous and proves to be an enemy."²⁷ 16

Figure 1: An arrest document from the Baku Provincial Gendarme Administration, dated March 1910, gives I. V. Djugashvili's nickname as "Koba." An insert identifying him as "Djugashvili (Stalin) Iosif" is a later typed addition. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), f.558, op.11, d.1647, no. 10.

     In the nineteenth century, Georgians prided themselves on their warrior culture and enjoyed a reputation among Russians as excellent horsemen and brave soldiers.²⁸ In Georgia, Ossetia, and throughout the North Caucasus, the custom of blood revenge, a particular characteristic of warrior societies, survived well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries despite the best efforts of the Russian and later Soviet authorities to suppress it.²⁹ Fieldwork among the peoples of the North Caucasus, Montenegro, and other traditional societies suggests commonalities with respect to a variety of types of blood revenge. In certain areas, for example, vengeance was symbolic, replacing the blood that had been lost rather than punishing the specific killer. It was also considered a psychological means of compensating for a strongly felt personal loss. Warrior "brothers" were "prone to retaliate homicidally when any one of their group was killed."³⁰ It will become clear how this tradition provided Stalin with the psychological response he needed when S. M. Kirov, one of his "warrior brothers," was assassinated. 17

     There were in the Georgian culture two alternatives open to an individual who found himself outside the protective cover offered by traditional society. Exploited, mistreated, or betrayed, the social bandit can become a rebellious loner who like Koba at the end of Qazbegi's novel wreaks revenge on his enemies but then fades into the forests.³¹ In a different social situation, the individual can undergo a dual socialization inside and outside the village community. As in other traditional societies undergoing modernization, the tension between the two increases as the outside world changes more rapidly. The strong sense of localness, of belonging to the village, can create defensiveness, even helplessness, outside it, a tension that has been described by anthropologists as greater in Georgia than among other peasant societies. Beyond the protection of the village, the child must learn how to survive in the no man's land where there is neither kin nor friend. What he seeks then is a substitute for the actual family (which in Soso's case was dysfunctional in any case) through spiritual kinship, a kind of brotherhood of warrior companions.³² 18

     When Soso was forced to leave his local enclave, his first attempt to create a family of his own ended in tragedy. His first wife, Ekaterina (Kato) Svanidze, a Georgian girl from a traditional religious background, died in 1908 shortly after the birth of their child, Iakov (Iasha). As a substitute, he painfully assembled a band of brothers from among his closest collaborators in a foreign land (Baku) bringing them with him as he rose to power: men such as Kirov, K. E. Voroshilov, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Anastas Mikoian, and Avel Enukidze. But Stalin did not give up on the idea of reconstituting a natural kinship system. His second attempt at the age of forty, when he married seventeen-year-old Nadezhda Allilueva in 1919, can be interpreted as a psychological imperative to mediate the contradictions of his multiple identities: proletarian, Georgian, Russian. She was the daughter of a veteran Marxist railroad worker who, though Russian, found work and a second home in the Caucasus. Later, during Stalin's years of exile, the Alliluev family was a source of constant support and refuge. Nadezhda's mother, who was part Georgian and spoke Russian with a strong accent, ran a Caucasian household. In 1917, Stalin lived from time to time in their apartment and appeared to regain some of the high spirits of his youth.³³ For him, they had already become a family before he married young Nadezhda. 19

Figure 2: From the Alliluev family album. Stalin's mother-in-law, Ol'ga Evgen'eva Allilueva (1905), and his father-in-law, Sergei Iakovlevich Alliluev (1914), who first met Stalin in Tbilisi in 1904. RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.1651, nos. 16 and 15.

Figure 3: From the family album of the Alliluevs. Stalin in 1915 during his Siberian exile and his future wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, taken in 1912, about a year after he met her. RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.1651, nos. 18 and 22.

     In his early years of power, Stalin surrounded himself with an enlarged family, combining his natural kinship, the relatives of both wives, and his spiritual kinship, the band of brothers. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s at Zubalovo, the estate of a former Caucasian industrialist, Stalin acted out the role of the traditional Georgian pater familia and host with both groups. He found his relatives and "brothers" places in the Soviet bureaucracy; at parties and banquets for the family and intimate friends, he was genial and entertaining, vastly enjoying the games of his own children and their friends, at least until disaster struck with the death of Nadezhda.³⁴ 20

     Stalin's emotional attachment to his Georgian past surfaced again in his selection of names for his children. His first born, Iakov (Jacob), was named for the son of the biblical Joseph, it would appear, as a concession to his religious first wife. But the name of his daughter, Svetlana, recalled the mother of the heroic Ossetian folk epos, Soslan, who was called "svetozarnaia Satana" (Bright Satana). Significantly, Stalin persistently referred to Svetlana as Satanka in letters to his wife.³⁵ To be sure, he despised the concepts of "feudal honor," the practice of gift giving, and other survivals of an outmoded class structure.³⁶ But Stalin was always selective in identifying with things Georgian. 21

     What must have been for him a personal idyll was smashed by two tragic events, the suicide of his second wife Nadezhda and the murder of Kirov. He mourned the loss of Nadezhda but also blamed her in bursts of self-pity: "The children will forget her in a few days, but me she has crippled for life."³⁷ The death of his wife deprived him of a real and symbolic center to his kinship group. He virtually abandoned Zubalovo and became a wanderer again, shifting his residence from place to place.³⁸ Within two years, Kirov was dead. According to the eyewitness account of Stalin's sister-in-law, Maria Svanidze, who saw Stalin almost daily, the assassination devastated him: "I am orphaned completely," he lamented.³⁹ After the assassination, his daughter Svetlana reflected, "He ceased to believe in people; perhaps he never much believed in them."⁴⁰ The kinship structure was coming apart, and Stalin in his perverse way was helping to destroy it. Stalin perceived himself as the victim; the question was, who was the enemy? 22

     Stalin's impulsive initial reaction to Kirov's death took a peculiar form of vengeance in the code of blood revenge. He retaliated against whoever was close at hand, in this case, a group of "white guardists," officers and officials of the old regime who had been imprisoned for years in Leningrad, hence "innocent" in any modern juridical sense. Yet they represented the most extreme expression of counter-revolution and as such served as symbolic objects for Stalin in avenging the death of Leningrad's foremost representative of Soviet power. Only after this spontaneous, emotional outburst did he begin to exploit Kirov's death more systematically by widening the circle of enemies to encompass the "Leningrad terrorist center" of Zinovievites.⁴¹ 23

     Stalin's campaign against the Old Bolshevik oppositionists cleared the way for L. P. Beria, who had already prepared his deep infiltration into the band of brothers, to play the Georgian card. Since the 1920s, Beria had worked tirelessly to ingratiate himself with Stalin. By the early 1930s, he had clawed his way up the ladder of power in Georgia, becoming chairman of the Georgian State Political Directorate (GPU) and then first secretary of the Georgian party. He had gained the confidence of Stalin and Grigory Ordzhonikidze through intrigue and denunciation in the complex world of Georgian Bolshevism. But he had higher ambitions.⁴² Since early 1933, he had been reworking the history of the Bolshevik organization in Transcaucasia in order to magnify Stalin's role in the revolutionary struggle in the Caucasus. He had established a Stalin Institute in Tbilisi to collect and where necessary to repress all the relevant materials and to organize the writing of a book, On the History of the Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucasus, for which he took full credit.⁴³ Highly tendentious, it transformed Stalin from a modest, even peripheral figure into the dominant Bolshevik revolutionary leader of the region.⁴⁴ 24

     In order to rewrite history and demonstrate his loyalty to Stalin, Beria had to discredit the memoirs of A. S. Enukidze, among others.⁴⁵ An old friend of Stalin and veteran Bolshevik, Enukidze was secretary of the Central Executive Committee and thus responsible for security in the Kremlin. He was also the godfather to Stalin's wife Nadezhda, a relationship that was taken very seriously in Georgian culture. In light of Beria's "revelations," Stalin set one of his trusted assistants, Lev Mekhlis, at work to expose Enukidze's errors.⁴⁶ Shortly after Kirov's assassination, Enukidze was obliged to respond to the attacks on his work in a half-page of self-criticism in Pravda. Within a few months, Beria had launched a purge of the Transcaucasian party organizations and published his book. Simultaneously, Enukidze was publicly accused at the June 1935 Party Plenum of moral laxness and protecting "enemies" within the service personnel of the Kremlin. A series of speakers including Beria succeeded in gaining approval for Enukidze's expulsion from the Central Executive Committee and also the party. Stalin's proposal for a more moderate solution may have been no more than play acting. Enukidze was arrested and shot in 1937.⁴⁷ 25

     Enukidze was the first Old Bolshevik without an oppositionist past to be expelled from the party; perhaps even more important, he was the first of Stalin's inner circle to be condemned. It was the opening of Beria's campaign to replace Stalin's natural and spiritual kinship systems with one of his own. For two decades, Stalin had engaged in the brutal repression of his enemies in his struggle for power. He now began to test the loyalty of his warrior brothers. Some, like Ordzhonikidze, could not take the strain and committed suicide. For Stalin, this was more evidence of betrayal. At the same time, Beria began something new. Once he became head of the NKVD, he systematically wiped out Stalin's Georgian relatives, whose hatred for Beria was universal.⁴⁸ But there was no attempt to touch the Alliluevs. Stalin allowed most of the Svanidzes to be arrested and destroyed and gradually abandoned his Georgian lifestyle. At the same time, he represented himself to the outer world, in the materials of Molodaia Gvardiia, as a true son of the Georgian people.⁴⁹ For Stalin, the Koba image of a solitary and vengeful hero triumphed over the natural and spiritual kinship system he had constructed to protect himself against the no man's land of the outer world that then engulfed him. 26

     In defining his Georgian identity, the one element that remained absolutely constant was language. Until he was twenty-eight years of age, he wrote and published exclusively in Georgian. This includes not only his early political writings but also his youthful poetry. That the great leader, the vozhd', was sufficiently proud of his sentimental and romantic adolescent effusions to have them mentioned prominently in the materials for his biography is surprising enough. What is truly astonishing is that there was no attempt to conceal the original conditions of publication. The dedication reads "to Prince R. D. Eristov." Famous in his day as a poet, dramatist, ethnographer, and Georgian patriot, Eristov had been an early critic of serfdom and was known as "the people's poet" for his celebration of the peasant way of life (byt'). But in his later years, he turned more and more to nationalist themes, particularly the Georgian resistance to the Muslims of Turkey and Persia.⁵⁰ At first glance, young Soso's choice of the newspaper Iveriia as the vehicle for his poetic debut appeared to be another anachronism. Edited by another prince, Ilia Chavchavadze, Iveriia was a "progressive" organ of the critical Georgian intelligentsia, but it was also highly nationalist and subsequently one of the main targets of the early social-democratic press in Georgia.⁵¹ Moreover, the poems were published at a time—from June to December 1895—when, according to reminiscences in Molodaia Gvardiia, Soso Djugashvili had first read Karl Marx's Capital. The sixth and last poem was published the following year, 1896, in Kvali (The Furrow) a legal, left-wing reformist newspaper identified in the first volume of Stalin's Collected Works as "an organ of a liberal-nationalist orientation."⁵² Yet the memoirists cited in Molodaia Gvardiia testified that at this very time Stalin had already formed the first illegal, Marxist circle at the Tbilisi Seminary and become "a propagandist of Marxism."⁵³ Given the discrepancy between the dreamy poet writing for Georgian nationalist organs and the Marxist novitiate organizing illegal reading circles, there have been some who have doubted that the verse was really Stalin's.⁵⁴ Whatever the truth of the matter, the important point is that Stalin claimed authorship and thereby a place, however modest, in the Georgian national literary tradition. 27

     For Stalin, the defense of the right of nationalities to use their own languages was the glue with which he could join ethnicity and class, Georgian and proletarian, in a sturdy double frame. There can be no mystery about his lifelong consistency on this issue, notwithstanding the twists and turns taken by other aspects of his nationality policy. He never forgot, as he put it in 1904, that "language was the instrument of development and struggle."⁵⁵ Once in power, he continued to insist on the importance of recognizing local languages. For example, in 1925, he wrote to the Presidium of the Central Committee demanding "complete freedom" for the submission of documents and applications to it in any language of any national group of the Russian Republic without exception.⁵⁶ Despite the 1938 language decree on the compulsory teaching of Russian, the Molodaia Gvardiia materials stressed how the evils of linguistic russification under tsarism had sparked a political backlash among disaffected Georgian youth, Soso Djugashvili among them.⁵⁷ Stalin's awareness of the political implications of "linguicide" went beyond his concern as a ruler over its potential to generate resistance to any established authority, including the Soviet. His experience as a man of the borderlands had taught him that defending the right of a nationality to employ its own language was necessary to offset the centrifugal nationalist forces in Caucasian political life; later, its purpose was to defend the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union against right-wing nationalist deviations, which, combined with foreign intervention, could lead to the disintegration of the state. To be sure, Stalin reserved for himself the right to determine how many national languages existed in the Soviet Union, and he counted differently at different times.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, even after he called a halt to political korenizatsiia (the Soviet version of affirmative action) in the mid to late 1930s, he retained important elements of its cultural dimensions.⁵⁹ Until the end of his life, he remained committed to the defense of national languages as he defined them, a reminder that there were limits to russification if not to centralization.⁶⁰ For Stalin, then, his Georgianness was emblematic of the multi-cultural state over which he ruled. 28

Crucial to Stalin's revolutionary career was his presentation of self in the second frame as a symbolic proletarian. Here, too, he sought to transform the stigma of his class origins into a badge of honor. Born into a poor but not impoverished family of ex-serfs, his passport identified him as a peasant until 1917. His father, Vissarion, wandered between the traditional world of the peasant and the modern urban life of a proletarian, pausing from time to time at the way station of independent craftsman. The story presented by the material in Molodaia Gvardiia is that Vissarion opposed his son's further education and took him off to work in a leather factory in Tbilisi. Interviews with old factory veterans and ethnographic documentation give a vivid and horrifying picture of working conditions. There is no indication how long young Soso was exposed to this dangerous and unhealthy atmosphere before his mother, "after some time," rescued him and returned him to school. But other excerpts taken from contemporary sources paint just as grim a picture of life in the villages like those surrounding Stalin's hometown.⁶¹ The impression is left that Stalin experienced class exploitation firsthand and not as so many other Marxist intellectuals only by reading books. 29

     Identifying himself as a proletarian was not only a retrospective tactic. In his earliest polemics with the Georgian Menshevik leader Noi Zhordaniia, Stalin took great pains to defend V. I. Lenin's concept of the relationship between the party and the working class in terms that appeared to dispel the image of subordination of the latter to the former. His exegesis of Lenin drew the distinction between the ease with which the workers could "assimilate" (usvaivat') socialism and their inability to "work out" (vyrabotat') scientific socialism on their own. Similarly, he refuted Zhordaniia's claim that Lenin had denigrated the worker as someone who was "'by virtue of his condition more of a bourgeois than a socialist.'" The point is, Stalin insisted, "I can be a proletarian and not a bourgeois by virtue of my condition and not be aware of my condition and therefore subject myself to bourgeois ideology." By adopting a hard line on matters of party organization and discipline, Stalin associated himself symbolically with the tendency of "proletarian steadfastness" (Bolshevik) as opposed to the tendency of "the intelligentsia to vacillate" (Menshevism).⁶² 30

     Framing himself as a proletarian was for Stalin a complex process that involved a redefinition of the word itself. The descriptive elements he most frequently employed were "hard" or "firm" as opposed to "soft" or "wavering," the underground conspirator as opposed to the "liquidator," and the man of practice (praktik) as opposed to the man of theory (teoretik). His appearance, whether consciously or not, reinforced the impression. With the exception of those few months when his father had dragged him off to a Tbilisi leather factory, Stalin was never a manual worker. But he took on all the trappings of one: his dress, speech, mannerisms, and public demeanor all suggested a man of humble origins, at least before World War II. When he was reproached for his coarse and vicious language in his Caucasus days, "he would excuse himself by claiming to speak the language of a proletarian and that proletarians did not engage in delicate manners."⁶³ There are many witnesses to his spartan style of living, his indifference to amassing wealth even after he rose to a position of unchallenged power.⁶⁴ 31

     Throughout his early career, Stalin continued to associate himself symbolically, whenever possible, with workers, as if to erase the stigma of his peasant origins and passport identity. On March 25, 1907, in the village cemetery of Chagani, Kutais Province, he gave a funeral oration in which he identified himself with the life of a young worker and social-democratic activist, G. P. Teliia. He set the tone from the beginning: "Comrade Teliia did not belong to the category of 'scholars.'" He was self-educated, taught himself Russian, worked first as a servant, which did not suit him, then as a worker in a railroad lathe shop. He became a propagandist, threw himself into the Tbilisi demonstrations of 1901, gave all his time to socialist self-education, was relentlessly pursued by the police, went underground, moved from city to city, established an illegal press in Batum, was sent to prison, which became his second school. He begins to write and publish, but consumption, the curse of his imprisonment, carries him off. "Only in the ranks of the proletariat," Stalin intones, "do we meet such people as Teliia, only the proletariat gives birth to such heroes as Teliia, and that same proletariat will strive to revenge itself on the cursed order which claimed our comrade as a victim, the worker G. Teliia."⁶⁵ 32

     Stalin's identification with the proletariat did not mean that he accepted workers as his equal. For example, in 1901, Stalin opposed worker participation in the Tbilisi Committee. The Tbilisi workers, by origin Georgian or related groups such as Ossetians and Mingrelians, had close ties to their villages and the mountains and retained much of the independent and militant spirit of resistance to Russian rule. It was not surprising, then, that they did not take kindly to any signs of superiority among political agitators like Stalin. Nor were the workers averse to carrying out acts of individual terror against government spies and provocateurs, of whom, it was estimated, there were about 500 in Tbilisi alone. The attempts of some of the social-democratic propagandists to control these "excesses" were also a source of friction.⁶⁶ 33

Figure 4: Painting by N. Shtenberg, "The First Elected Tbilisi Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party Organized in 1901 on the Initiative of Comrade Stalin and under His Leadership." Shown at the Exhibition of Georgian Art, Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, November 1937. An example of Stalin's fabrication of his biography. In fact, the Tbilisi Committee had been in existence since 1898, and Stalin was only elected to it in November 1901. Izvestiia 267 (November 17, 1937).

     An incident involving Stalin reveals how his presentation of self as a proletarian was vulnerable to exposure as a deception. One member of the committee, subsequently a Bolshevik, without referring to Stalin by name, described a "young, uncouth [nerazborchivyi] intelligentsia comrade [sic], 'energetic' in all things, [who] invoking conspiratorial considerations, lack of preparedness, and lack of consciousness of the workers, came out against admitting workers to the committee." Shortly afterward, this "young comrade" left Tbilisi for Batum, where the local comrades reported back on "his unbecoming attitude, hostile and disruptive agitation against the Tbilisi organization and its activists." In Tbilisi, this was attributed to individual shortcomings and not to principled stands of a type who was given to "personal capriciousness and a tendency to despotic behavior."⁶⁷ But the reports came from hostile sources. In Batum, Stalin was careful to live and work in the midst of the working class as if to underline the difference between himself and the "drawing-room revolutionaries" such as the future Mensheviks Nikolai Chkheidze and Isidor Ramashvili, who lived far from the workers' district.⁶⁸ 34

     In 1907, Stalin was more successful at enforcing his claim to be a proletarian in Baku, where he found a new and receptive audience, the Russian worker. Twenty-three different nationalities were represented in the city, but the Russians, who constituted one-quarter of the proletariat, were the most literate, skilled, and ripe for organization.⁶⁹ Stalin found it easier to battle the moderate Russian Mensheviks for the allegiance of Russian workers in Baku than to compete with the more militant Georgian Mensheviks on his and their home ground. By shifting the locus of his activities to Baku, he could also identify himself with a real proletarian center, which he then compared favorably to the place that had rejected him: in Baku, "the sharp class position of the Bolsheviks finds a lively resonance among the workers," as opposed to the "stagnation" in Tbilisi, where the absence of sharp class conflict has turned the city into "something like a swamp awaiting an external impulse."⁷⁰ 35

     In his battle with the Mensheviks, Stalin was shrewd enough to realize that competing for the loyalties of the skilled Russian workers alone would not enable him to gain the advantage. Stalin soon turned to a source that offered no interest to the Mensheviks and for which they had only contempt—the unskilled, largely illiterate, and unorganized Muslim oil field laborers, who constituted nearly half the working-class population of the city. Many of them were seasonal Azeri immigrants, both legal and illegal, from the northern provinces of Iran.⁷¹ But in order to penetrate the unfamiliar world of the Muslim workers, he needed allies. He found them among a small group of young Azeri radicals who began at the end of 1904 to form conspiratorial circles and to spread nationalist and social-democratic propaganda among the youth and urban poor. They called themselves Himmat, or Gummet in Russian (variously translated as Endeavor, Energy, or Mutual Aid) from their hectographed newspaper of that name. The leading Bolsheviks in Baku, A. M. Stopani, Alesha Dzhaparidze, Stepan Shaumian, and Stalin, gave them advice and supported their efforts.⁷² In return, Himmet generally threw its weight on the side of the Bolshevik-dominated Union of Oil Workers against the Menshevik-dominated Union of Mechanical Workers. Once outside of Georgia, Stalin could outmaneuver the Mensheviks by forging a proletarian alliance between Russians and Muslims, and it was of little concern to him that the opening to the latter was through an organization, Himmet, that had weaker credentials as a social-democratic party than his hated rivals the Georgian Mensheviks.⁷³ 36

     Stalin's contempt for "the scholars" was equal to that of Lenin's, but only Stalin among the very top party leaders liked to boast of a proletarian pedigree. During the struggle for power, he repeatedly invoked his worker identity. At the height of his great duel with Trotsky, when he was scrambling to defend his doctrine of "socialism in one country," Stalin found himself outclassed at the theoretical level. But he could and did appeal to a party cadre no longer dominated by intellectuals by offering a different set of revolutionary credentials through his personal identification with the social foundations of the "workers and peasants' state" he proposed to construct in the Soviet Union. 37

     In a speech delivered in Tbilisi at a welcoming ceremony during a visit to Georgia in June 1926, Stalin constructed a proletarian biography in three stages by weaving together proletarian and religious imagery.⁷⁴ As in Bauman's metaphor of the pilgrim, Stalin represented his journey from Georgia to Russia as a transformation that combined a quantitative leap in class consciousness with the ritual washing away at each stage of the original sin of ignorance. He declared that "my first teachers were the Tbilisi workers." They had given him his lessons in practical work: "Compared to them I was a greenhorn." He modestly admitted that he may have read a bit more than they, but, "as a practical worker, I was then without a doubt just an apprentice." "Here in this circle of comrades I then [1898] received my fighting, revolutionary baptism." In 1905–1907, he discovered from the workers of Baku what it was "to lead large masses of workers." It was here that he received "his second fighting revolutionary baptism. Here I became a journeyman of the revolution." This was followed by a period of "wanderings [skitanii] in prisons and exile." In Petrograd (Stalin wrote Leningrad), "in the circle of Russian workers—the liberators of subjugated peoples and the skirmishers of the proletarian struggle of all nations and peoples—I received my third fighting revolutionary baptism." Only then was Lenin readmitted to the script: "There in Russia under the guidance of Lenin I became a master of the revolution." In his rhetorical flights, Stalin forged a link between his self-image as a proletarian and the development of the state by invoking the image of Russia as "the metallic country." This theme, too, was taken up and embellished by his sycophants and the official folklore.⁷⁵ 38

     The extent to which Stalin's efforts to present himself as a symbolic proletarian affected the outcome of the struggle for power in the party may be glimpsed in N. I. Bukharin's fearful exchange with the Menshevik émigré Fedor Dan in Paris in 1933. When asked how he and other members of the party could have entrusted such a "devil" with their fate, its fate, and the fate of the country, Bukharin replied: "You do not understand, it was quite different; he was not trusted, but he was the man whom the party trusted; this is how it happened: he is like the symbol of the party, the lower strata [nizy], the workers, the people trust him; perhaps it is our fault, but that's the way it happened, that is why we all walked into his jaws . . . knowing probably that he would devour us."⁷⁶ 39

The three most prominent elements in composing Stalin's Russian frame gradually emerged in his adaptation of Russian as his preferred political language, his location of the primary base of world revolution in the Great Russian core territory, and his self-identification with Russian national heroes such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He acquired these dimensions of his identity in bitter struggles with his political opponents, first in the local party organizations of the Caucasus and then on the all-Russian level. Whatever his larger ambitions may have been to play on a national scene, his more modest efforts to achieve local successes were frustrated by opponents he came to resent with a bitterness that was only slaked by his conquest of the Caucasus in 1923. 40

     Stalin's clash with the leaders of Georgian Menshevism illustrates the complex, even contradictory relationships between his Georgian and Russian identities. His dealings with them provided much of the momentum that propelled him from the periphery to the core of empire, from the Caucasian borderlands to the Great Russian center. To begin with, there were striking differences between him and them on the basis of social origins, level of formal education, and their experience of Europe and its languages compared with his provincialism. Most of them belonged to a European-educated, déclassé nobility. They fashioned a revolutionary ideology that combined national resistance and socioeconomic discontent in a very different fashion from their Russian counterparts and the small number of Georgian Marxists including Stalin who were excluded from their tightly knit group. With their assistance, the peasant disturbances that had begun in 1901 reached a climax during the Revolution of 1905 in the establishment of a virtual peasant socialist republic in their home district of Kutais Province, formerly the kingdom of Guriia.⁷⁷ 41

     Stalin's first public clash with the Georgian social democrats came over the implications of these events for the party's stand on the agrarian question. As early as the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP) in 1903, the Georgian delegates portrayed the peasantry as a genuine revolutionary force and demanded that the special economic conditions of the Georgian peasants be recognized in the party program.⁷⁸ The Revolution of 1905 convinced the Georgian Mensheviks more than ever that unless they met the practical needs of their peasant constituency, there could be no successful revolutionary outcome in Georgia. At the Fourth (Stockholm) Unity Congress in 1906, they agitated for a new two-pronged agrarian platform that would redistribute confiscated state, church, and landlord land between the peasants and locally elected municipalities.⁷⁹ 42

     Stalin's reaction to these debates was a misguided attempt to carve out his own position on the agrarian question. He opposed the views of the Bolshevik majority on nationalization, knowing that endorsement was tantamount to political suicide in Georgia. But he also rejected municipalization because it would have meant acknowledging the leadership of the Georgian Mensheviks in the countryside. He contemptuously dismissed the importance of the Guriian rising as a purely local phenomenon. "In general a lot of legends have been spread about Guriia, and it would be entirely unjust for comrades from the rest of the country to take them for the truth."⁸⁰ While the Bolsheviks ignored his defection from their ranks, the Georgian Mensheviks ridiculed him on the floor of the congress.⁸¹ 43

     To untangle the differences between Stalin and the Georgian Mensheviks on the national question is more difficult, because in the early debates within the RSDRP there was no disagreement in principle between the Bolsheviks and Georgian Mensheviks on this issue.⁸² Yet Stalin managed to introduce differences in tone and emphasis that set him apart from his rivals. Where Stalin went beyond the Georgian Mensheviks and even Lenin in shaping a different concept of the national question in Georgia was in what might be called his "borderland thesis." He sought to identify the condition of underdeveloped class consciousness with the territorial periphery of the empire. On occasion, Lenin was willing to acknowledge the special position of the Georgian Mensheviks in return for political favors.⁸³ But Stalin denounced the Mensheviks, making no exceptions for the Georgians as representatives of regions that were, with the exception of southern Russia, "centers of small-scale production": the Caucasus, Transcaucasian region, and the towns of the western provinces under the influence of the Bund and the peasant organizations of the "Spilka" (Ukrainian Social Democratic Union). Thus Menshevik tactics were "the tactics of backward towns," while the Bolsheviks represented the "advanced towns, the industrial centers" where revolution and class consciousness were primary. Stalin offered further evidence for his conclusion by claiming that the Bolsheviks counted more workers among their delegates, thus refuting the Menshevik claim that it was a party of intellectuals, and more Russians, whereas the majority of Mensheviks were Jews and Georgians.⁸⁴ Subsequently, Stalin would make his "borderland thesis" the foundation on which he built his theory of Soviet statehood. 44

     Aside from theoretical considerations, the hard school of practical politics brought Stalin to the realization that he could not challenge the Georgian Mensheviks either in his own country or in Transcaucasia as a whole. They blocked him at every turn in his quest to become a revolutionary leader.⁸⁵ In 1901, he had been obliged to leave the Tbilisi Committee dominated by supporters of Zhordaniia under humiliating circumstances. As a result of the growing Menshevik strength in Georgia, Stalin failed to get elected as a delegate to the Fourth "Unity" Congress in Stockholm or the Fifth Congress in London. When he showed up with spurious documents, the Georgian Mensheviks challenged his credentials both times, humiliating him on the floor of the congresses.⁸⁶ Nor was Stalin's attempt to create a legal Bolshevik press in Georgia any more successful than his other organizing efforts in the region.⁸⁷ 45

     For Stalin, then, all roads seemed to lead out of Georgia. Returning from London to Baku in May 1907, Stalin submitted his first signed article in Russian on the congress to the illegal Bolshevik newspaper Bakinskii proletarii; he never again published anything in Georgian.⁸⁸ The Bolshevik press of Baku, though Russian, was still provincial and attracted little attention in the political and intellectual core areas of the empire. But Stalin had taken a decisive step in his quest for his self-identity, changing his linguistic signposts as he followed the way of the pilgrim. 46

     Stalin's first publication outside Transcaucasia came in February 1910, when his "Letter from the Caucasus" appeared in the organ of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Sotsial Demokrat. In journalism as elsewhere in his activities, the pilgrim's progress was slow. Two years elapsed before he authored another piece for an all-Russian audience, this time in the form of a leaflet "For the Party," which bore the signature of the Central Committee of the RSDRP throughout Russia.⁸⁹ Shortly afterward, he began to write regularly for the central Bolshevik organs in St. Petersburg.⁹⁰ This marked the end of his participation in the provincial press of Transcaucasia. Thereafter, his attitude toward Georgia was marked by a deep ambivalence. 47

     For Stalin, the pilgrim, Baku was the halfway house to what became his final destination. It was there that for the first time he had lived through revolutionary events, immersed himself in mass politics, and played the role of a Kulturträger of Marxism in its Russian form to the Muslim world. There, too, he had escaped the stifling atmosphere of Georgian Menshevism, which represented for him all he despised, opposed, and sought to destroy. The key to his growing success as a professional revolutionary was his closer association with things Russian. From this time forward, he displayed an increasing tendency to frame his activities and his symbolic gestures in ways best suited to reinforce his Russian identity, but always with a Georgian accent, style, and proletarian gruffness. Following the London Congress, Stalin spent a total of only two years or less in his native region. Once in power, he paid three short visits to his mother, in 1921, 1927, and 1935, although he continued to correspond with her in Georgian until the month of her death in 1937.⁹¹ 48

     This did not mean that Stalin had come to a decision to abandon his Georgian identity in favor of adopting a Russian one. Rather, he was shifting from his primary aim of being a Bolshevik in Georgia to becoming a Georgian in Russian Bolshevism. Nor was this the result of a sudden decision, although the London Congress appears to have been a crucial turning point. It was, instead, the outcome of a long and uncertain struggle. For reasons that can only be guessed at, Stalin himself left behind the evidence with which this struggle can be traced if not fully plumbed. It lies in his search for the most appropriate name.⁹² 49

     Choosing a nickname or a pseudonym can be one of the most purposeful and decisive acts of presenting oneself to the external world. The adoption of a new public identity that also becomes a very private one is, to borrow an illuminating phrase of Ludwig von Wittgenstein's, "an occult process." It acquires the status of a magical formula, a cultural totem.⁹³ The individual receives a baptismal name from his parents without prior knowledge, discussion, or consent. The adoption of a pseudonym is an act of will, a "speech act" that creates an alternative identity and, since others are obliged to use it, legitimizes the descriptive characteristics associated with it.⁹⁴ 50

     Pseudonyms used in the context of revolutionary activity or underground resistance are emblems of political and social engagement in the form of self-begetting. Different from authorial pseudonyms, they are associated with a collective, a "shadow army" taking its value from the dual process of initiation and ordination similar to entering a priesthood. They are a means to reveal or conceal, to instruct or deceive, depending on different audiences, whether comrades or police. Their primary practical purpose is to serve as protection; clandestine circumstances require that they be changed frequently in order to avoid detection.⁹⁵ The plurality of revolutionary pseudonyms was a characteristic feature of the Russian revolutionaries, employed more often when traveling with passports under an assumed name than when publishing, when the established ideological identity of the author counted for a great deal. Stalin used many aliases and party cover names to elude the police, but in almost every case he immediately discarded them. Some are variations of his given name or patronymic; others appear to have been selected at random without any deep symbolic significance.⁹⁶ 51

     The decision to turn the fantasy nickname of boyhood, Koba, into a revolutionary pseudonym was not taken quickly, a sign of its seriousness. In Volume 1 of Stalin's Collected Works, the signature "Koba" first appears only on item twenty-three of the published pieces. The rest are either anonymous or signed by a collective underground group, such as the Tbilisi Committee, with three exceptions: they bear the signature "I. Besoshvili." "Beso" is the diminutive for Vissarion, his father's name, and "shvili" a Georgian suffix meaning son of, so that his name change was transparent to the few who knew him, and it bore such a close resemblance to his real name that it could hardly have signified a bold assertion of a new self-image, to say nothing of an attempt to disguise his ethnic identity.⁹⁷ It was only later that year, following his first appearance at an international meeting of social democrats at the Stockholm Conference in April 1906, that he signed himself Koba. Over the following decade, it was his preferred pseudonym as an author and in his underground activities. Even after he became Stalin in public, his former identity remained intact for much longer in the private sphere. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the preservation of a name from the past "assures continuity across time and unity of personality across space which are the manifestations of this individuality in different fields."⁹⁸ 52

     Well into the 1930s, he was still affectionately known as Koba among some of his oldest Bolshevik comrades, including Bukharin, whose last poignant note from prison read: "Koba, why do you want me to die?"⁹⁹ After the great purge trials, there was virtually no one left to call Stalin Koba. But long before it became impossible to address the vozhd' informally, Koba had accumulated new layers of meaning. It preserved the moment of a new birth and also the sense of the fraternity of struggle, which by the early 1930s was already imbued with a terrible irony. It also metamorphosed into a term of familiarity, even intimacy, although in Trotsky's hands it acquired the sharp edge of contempt.¹⁰⁰ The question that has remained up to now is how "Koba" became "Stalin."¹⁰¹ 53

     The pseudonym Koba or various abbreviations of it such as "Ko..." remained Djugashvili's signature from July 13, 1906, to July 13, 1909, with one significant modification and two important exceptions. The modification came in 1907, when he signed himself Koba Ivanovich in publishing his report on the London Congress in Bakinskii proletarii, the illegal Bolshevik organ in Baku.¹⁰² By combining his Georgian nom de guerre with a Russian patronymic, he presented himself for the first time to revolutionary organizations in Transcaucasia and in Russia as a man who bridged two cultural worlds. 54

     The two important exceptions were his use of the pseudonym "K. Kato" in March and June 1908 in what may have been a private reference to the most painful episode in his personal life in the Caucasus. In Georgian, Kato is an affectionate diminutive for Ekaterina, which was the name of his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze. It was also the name of his mother, but the diminutive used for her in all the sources is "Keko." Kato, on the other hand, is reserved for his wife. Almost nothing is known about the marriage; even the date is in question.¹⁰³ But there is evidence that in March 1908 Kato gave birth to their first and only child, a son, Iakov.¹⁰⁴ On the eve of his son's birthday, Koba published an article in the revolutionary press signed K. Kato. Can this be anything other than his own way of celebrating a joyous occasion? By linking his wife's name with his own in the form of his symbolic initial, he was able to create an emotionally powerful aleatory effect.¹⁰⁵ Sometime later, the young mother died, devastating Djugashvili, but until now the date and causes have been unknown.¹⁰⁶ The second time Koba used K. Kato may explain both. This signature appeared under three articles published in late April and early May 1908 while he was in prison. Was this not another commemoration, a terrible one, of his wife's death? If so, then it appears likely that Kato died from complications resulting from childbirth shortly after Iakov was born on March 16 and before Koba was arrested on March 25. Such a deduction would also explain why the stricken Koba rejected his son, blaming him for his wife's early death. He turned the infant over to his sister-in-law to be raised in Georgian schools until the 1920s, when the boy's uncle, Aleksandr Svanidze, insisted that he join the family in Moscow. According to Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, Stalin opposed Iakov's coming and ridiculed him at every opportunity, even when the young man bungled a suicide attempt. When the Germans took Iakov prisoner during World War II, Stalin refused to accept a German offer to exchange him for some German officers.¹⁰⁷ The episode suggests how Koba used pseudonyms to mark important emotional stages in his inner life. 55

     His search took another turn in the first article that he published in an all-Russian organ of the Bolshevik fraction, Sotsial Demokrat, in January 1910. Here, the initials "K.S." appear for the first time, leading to speculation that Koba was already thinking of himself as Stalin. But this was not the case, for the signature on the original manuscript of December 1909 was K. Stefin.¹⁰⁸ It is therefore safe to conclude that the signature K. St. under the following article in the Collected Works refers to Stefin and not Stalin. To be sure, Stefin may be considered a Russian name, although an odd one. 56

     From 1910 to 1913, there is evidence of hesitation. Now writing for all-Russian publications, Djugashvili appears loath to give up K. as the emblem of his mythic Georgian past. But he cannot yet find the appropriate Russian name to go with it until 1913 when for the first time he appends the name "K. Stalin" to his major theoretical work "Marxism and the National and Colonial Question." Even after that in January 1917, he reverts to the initials K.St.¹⁰⁹ In the interim, the frequent changes in pseudonyms hint at a psychodrama that is otherwise hidden from view. After its first use, K.St. does not show up again for two years. Instead, there is a return twice to K.S. and then simply S., when he writes for the first time for the St. Petersburg paper Zvezda. In quick succession, S yields to S—n; is he getting closer? No, for the next signatures to appear are K. Salin and K. Solin. Then there is a return to K.S. and to K. Solin twice more. It is clear by this time that Koba is fascinated with the acoustical combination of K and S or St. Does Georgian-Ossetian folklore once again provide a clue? The most popular hero of Ossetian tales is Soslan Stal'noi (Soslan the Iron Man), with variations in other North Caucasian epics. The cult of iron or steel was very widely, possibly uniquely, prevalent in the Caucasian oral tradition, and Soslan the Iron Man was portrayed as both a defender and occasionally the ruthless destroyer of his kinsmen.¹¹⁰ But the suffix "an" is not Russian, while "in" is and has the added attraction of identifying its bearer with Lenin. 57

     By the time Koba is writing for Pravda in October 1912, he falls back on the more ambiguous K.St. three times until the New Year reveals him as K. Stalin. The new pseudonym referred to all three frames of his identity: the Georgian hero Koba and thus the heroic attributes of Georgian heroes, the hard proletarian symbolized by the root word steel, and the Russian form of the name with its "in" suffix. 58

Pseudonym Date First Used Number in
Collected Works Number in
All Verified Published Works Language of
Original Article

I. Besoshvili Mar. 10, 1906 3 6 Georgian

Koba June 21, 1906 4 10 Georgian

Comrade K. Aug. 7, 1906 1 1 Georgian

Ko… Sept. 14, 1906 8 10 Georgian

Koba Ivanovich June 20, 1907 1 1 Russian

K. Kato Mar. 2, 1908 2 4 Russian

K.Ko Aug. 27, 1909 1 1 Russian

K.S. Feb. 13, 1910 4 4 Russian

S. Apr. 15, 1912 1 1 Russian

K. S…n Apr. 15, 1912 1 1 Russian

K. Salin Apr. 15, 1912 1 1 Russian

K. Solin Apr. 17, 1912 3 3 Russian

K.St (Stefin) Oct. 19, 1912 6 6 Russian

K. Stalin Dec. 1, 1912 25 26 Russian

K. Sept. 12, 1917 1 1 Russian

I. or Iosif Djugashvili-Stalin Sept. 2, 1917 3 9 Russian

Figure 5: Pseudonyms used by Stalin in his published works, 1906–1917.

     Signaling his emergence as the man of steel, his authorship of his 1913 work on the national question performed three additional functions in his efforts to define and assert his complex persona. It staked his claim to pronounce on issues that were essential in his deadly conflict with the Georgian Mensheviks, it applied a uniform finish to all three frames of experience and myth constructed over the previous decade and a half, and it announced the end to his pilgrimage from periphery to center. His essay may not impress by its theoretical originality or stylistic bravura, but as a statement of his personal and ideological integration it may serve as a useful guide to Stalin's subsequent actions as a state-builder and imperial statesman. 59

     Stalin composed his essay on the national question in response to urgent prompting by Lenin, who was alarmed by the meeting in August 1912 in Vienna at Trotsky's invitation of anti-Bolshevik social democrats to discuss a decentralized structure of the party that would meet the demands for national cultural autonomy of such groups as the Georgian Mensheviks, Bund, and Latvians. For Lenin (and Stalin as well), there was a real danger that the RSDRP would disintegrate into a set of loosely grouped national-socialist parties as in Austria-Hungary.¹¹¹ With characteristic single-mindedness, therefore, Lenin immersed himself in the national question, furiously writing articles and rounding up allies for a verbal onslaught against his opponents. By one count, he wrote no fewer than thirty articles on the subject between 1912 and 1914. Simultaneously, he was busily urging some of his closest associates to help him recruit comrades of varied ethnic origin or else to volunteer themselves to write specialized studies. Stalin was only one of several Bolsheviks who responded to the call.¹¹² Lenin greeted all their contributions with enthusiasm, although he was not entirely satisfied with any one of them.¹¹³ 60

     Stalin's work on the national question brought into alignment the three frames of his personal identity that he had struggled to harmonize. The class interests of the proletariat determined the right to exercise national self-determination, regional autonomy guarded the rights to use indigenous languages, and the Russian state provided the "general framework" for political organization of the whole. Stalin's work both summarized his earlier concepts and foreshadowed the concept of the state he would propose, defend against Lenin, and finally impose on the party in the postrevolutionary era. 61

In politics, Stalin has been most often portrayed as either a pragmatist or an ideologue. By contrast, the previous analysis has argued that his approach to both practice and theory was embedded in his experience as a man of the borderlands who sought to play a major role at center of power. On the way to becoming a self-proclaimed "master of the revolution," Stalin had pieced together a complex identity that embodied the rudiments of a tripartite state-building program. His self-presentation as a symbolic proletarian served to mediate between his Georgian and Russian identities, firmly linking periphery to core. As the following pages will demonstrate, once in power, he sought to combine these three elements in his shaping of the Soviet state as he had endeavored to integrate them into his own persona. 62

     Stalin emerged from the cauldron of revolution, civil war, and intervention more than ever convinced that the relationship between center and periphery embodied in what I have called his "borderland thesis" held the key to the construction of the new Soviet state. As early as the debates preceding Brest-Litovsk in the winter of 1917–1918, Stalin had been skeptical of the possibility of revolution in the West.¹¹⁴ If war were to come with the Austro-German imperialists, it would come over resistance to the Central Powers' occupation of the borderlands. In an unusual non-Marxist formulation that he would repeat in 1941, it would not be a revolutionary war but "a fatherland war [otechestvennaia voina] begun in Ukraine that will have every chance of all-out support from Soviet Russia as a whole."¹¹⁵ 63

     Stalin's solution for the dilemma of revolution confined to the borders of the old empire was the fusion of the class and national principles in the form of regional autonomy. The fusion would not be the result of a spontaneous joining together but of action by the center. At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, five years before the constitutional debate that brought him into conflict with Lenin, he made it clear that "the roots of all conflicts between the periphery and central Russia lie in the question of power."¹¹⁶ Expanding on earlier themes, he claimed that the socialist revolution in the Russian Empire had produced a situation in which a more advanced center, that is, a territorial core possessing a highly developed proletarian class, was bound to dominate a backward periphery. For Stalin, the periphery was backward not only in the economic but also in the cultural meaning of the term. In particular, "the people of the East," as he called them, lacked the homogeneity of the central provinces. They were barely emerging from the Middle Ages or else had just entered the state of capitalism.¹¹⁷ At the constitutional debates during the Twelfth Congress in 1923, when Stalin was hard pressed by his critics, he was even more bluntly specific: the center was a proletarian, the periphery a peasant region.¹¹⁸ This crude image enabled him to make explicit the link between the new Soviet state structure and the outside world. 64

     Throughout the Russian civil war, Stalin hammered at the theme of the socioeconomic backwardness of the periphery posing a mortal threat to the security and stability of the Soviet state. The lack of a strong local proletariat had given the local bourgeois nationalists—such as the Georgian Mensheviks—their opportunity to demand separation from the center, thus weakening the class-based Soviet power. This in turn had created "a zone of foreign intervention and occupation" that endangered its very existence.¹¹⁹ In order to defeat these machinations, Stalin came to the conclusion that the center could not count solely on physical coercion. He groped his way uncertainly toward a solution that would reconcile the conflicting identities of class, ethnicity, and region within a strong state system. He sought to convince both the unitarists and the autonomists within the party that they could not survive without one another. As the periphery crumbled away from the center, he claimed that only his federal solution would protect the separate republics from foreign domination and the loss of their autonomous rights. He reassured the nationalities that "there would be no state language." And he insisted the Soviet power must create local schools, courts, and administrative organs staffed and run by "local cadres," even if this meant cooperating with the non-Communist intelligentsia.¹²⁰ 65

Figure 6: From the Alliluev family album. Stalin in the early 1930s dressed in a Kirghiz national costume. RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.1651, no. 51.

     This latter policy, dubbed korenizatsiia from the stem word koren', was another example of the politics of identity that Stalin employed and manipulated to further his own ends. In 1925, during his struggle with Trotsky, he rehabilitated the slogan of "national culture" that he had previously identified only with nationalism as a right-wing deviation.¹²¹ Up to the early 1930s, he pursued korenizatsiia most consistently in the more underdeveloped republics. When, in his eyes, the policy threatened to go too far, as in Ukraine, he denounced it, first in 1926 and then more ferociously after 1928.¹²² Once Stalin had eliminated his major rivals in the party and launched collectivization and the first Five Year Plan, he brutally reshuffled the tripartite components of the state structure. Many if not all aspects of korenizatsiia and their supporters fell victim to the new policy. After 1933, ethnic deportations from the borderlands were stepped up to ensure greater security from external attack. Yet, at the same time, a policy of ethnic consolidation was undertaken in order to minimize ethnic conflict within the republics.¹²³ In building socialism, ethnic identity, so often equated with the peasantry, yielded primacy of place to proletarian identity. Stalin decreed that the distance between them would be closed not by a pilgrimage but by a forced march. 66

     In the early years of the Soviet state, however, Stalin's main concern was to substitute the mutual interdependence of Russia and the borderlands for the idea held by many Bolsheviks on the mutual interdependence of Russia and the world revolution. In 1920, he wrote, "Central Russia, the hearth of world revolution, cannot hold out long without the assistance of the border regions, which abound in raw materials, fuel, and foodstuffs. The border regions of Russia, in their turn, are inevitably doomed to imperialist bondage without the political, military, or organizational support of the more developed Central Russia."¹²⁴ Foreshadowing his doctrine of socialism in one country, he argued that the unity of center and periphery provided the two "constant conditions" that guaranteed the success and future development of the revolution, that is, Russia's "vast and boundless land" and its autarkic resource base.¹²⁵ Therefore, he trumped the nationalists by offering a form of association that he dubbed "socialist federalism," nationalist in form and socialist in content. Before 1917, Stalin had opposed the concept of federalism as divisive of working-class unity. Once the Bolsheviks were in power, he came to view it as a formula for unity within a polyethnic state.¹²⁶ 67

     Stalin's position on federation had shifted in response to the experience of the civil war, the intra-party debates on the future of the Soviet state, and his disagreements with Lenin. By 1922, Stalin envisaged three types of federalist ties: within the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, between the Russian republic (RSFSR) and the other Soviet republics such as Ukraine that had been part of the Russian Empire, and a "confederation" between the Soviet Union and other soviet republics such as Hungary and Germany that had not been part of Russia.¹²⁷ Stalin's tripartite formula sought to address real problems that had surfaced during the civil war between the center and periphery. In a letter to Lenin dated September 22, 1922, but only recently published, he argued that his federal plan would eliminate the chaos of conflicting jurisdictions, which created constant conflict between the center and the borderlands. The alternatives were either to grant the republics real independence, which would shatter the economic unity of the state (and split the proletariat), or to grant them real autonomy, that is, non-interference "in the areas of language, culture, justice, internal affairs, agriculture, etc.," which would maintain both the diversity of ethnic identities and the unity of the proletariat.¹²⁸ 68

     What has gone unnoticed in the abundant literature on this question is how Stalin's formula foreshadowed the establishment of a ring of dependent states, subsequently called "popular democracies," outside the borders of the old Russian Empire. While Lenin's state structure was designed to accommodate the future voluntary adhesion of independent revolutionary states in the advanced capitalist countries to a socialist federation, Stalin took a more limited view based on the old imperial, territorial principle. In Stalin's eyes, the Russian Revolution and the building of a socialist state catapulted the Soviet Union into the most advanced stage of development. Subsequent adherents to the system, particularly those countries adjacent to the Soviet Union, would have to earn their passage. In 1928, he made this explicit in his first major speech to the Comintern. He argued that, in countries with weak capitalism and feudal remnants, such as "Poland, Romania, etc.," where the peasantry would play a large role in a revolution, "the victory of the revolution in order that it can lead to a proletarian dictatorship can and probably will demand some intermediate stages in the form, let us say, of a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."¹²⁹ 69

     Later, Stalin changed the terminology of transitional stages but not the concept. In early 1945, he harshly reminded Tito that "your government is not Soviet—you have something between de Gaulle's France and the Soviet Union." In May 1946, he repeated the same message to the Polish communists. "The democracy that has been established in Poland, in Yugoslavia and partly in Czechoslovakia is a democracy that draws you close to socialism without the necessity of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet system."¹³⁰ Twenty years earlier, Stalin had constructed the state system on the basis of the what he perceived to be a special relationship between Russia and its borderlands that could never be duplicated. 70

     In defending his state-building program against Lenin's critique, Stalin sought to apply the lessons learned from the experience of framing the triptych of his personal identity to shaping new Soviet institutions. Only the compelling force of this deeply rooted conviction could explain his willingness to confront Lenin during the intra-party debates in the fall and winter of 1922–1923 over the constitutional question. There was, first of all, the question of the relationship between the borderlands and the center. Lenin disagreed with Stalin by insisting on recognizing the formal independence of the constituent Soviet republics, a position that had little support among the Bolsheviks except for the Georgians. L. B. Kamenev told Stalin that "Ilich was preparing for war in defense of independence" and had asked him to meet with the Georgians. Stalin's response revealed the deep source of his conflict with Lenin. In Stalin's eyes, the Georgian Bolsheviks had never traversed the route of his pilgrimage. They remained rooted in their native soil and were thus exposed to the most pernicious influences of local nationalism. "It's necessary to be firm with Ilich," Stalin told Kamenev. "If a couple of Georgian Mensheviks exercise an influence on the Georgian communists and consequently on Ilich, then one should ask—what does that have to do with independence?"¹³¹ 71

     His opposition to Georgian independence was matched by his concern over the effect of Lenin's formula on the structure of the Russian republic. Initially, Stalin feared that Lenin's proposal for a bicameral legislature (one Russian and one federal) would lead to the removal from the RSFSR of eight autonomous republics, their declaration of independence together with the Ukrainian and other independent republics, and a radical reconstruction of the entire state that was neither timely nor necessary.¹³² Not only would this encourage the Georgians, but it would move the Russian republic toward a more purely ethnic unit within a federation of ethnically defined states. In a note to his colleagues in the Politburo in February 1923, Stalin warned of the dangers. By separating the Russian population from that of the autonomous republics, such republics as the Bashkir, Kirgiz, and Tatar would be deprived of their capitals, which were Russian towns, and would require a serious redrawing of their boundaries.¹³³ Moreover, Stalin added in his speech to the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, the creation of a pure Russian republic would strengthen the position of Great Russians in the state as a whole and weaken "the struggle with Great Russian chauvinism [that] is our fundamental task." Finally, in much the same way, he argued against the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaizhan), because that would play into the hands of Georgian nationalists.¹³⁴ 72

     At the same time, Stalin was oblig