The Rise to Power of Joseph Djugashvili, Known to the World as Joseph Stalin

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The Rise to Power of Joeseph Djugashvili,
Known to the World as Joeseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili (Stalin) had a career in the revolutionary movement in Russia but he would not have risen to the power he achieved if it had not been for Vladimir Ulanov (Lenin) selecting him for the important assignment of being the minister in the Bolshevik government responsible for national minorities. The assignment did not initially include an office, but Djugashvili set up a table and chair and began to compile a card index of contacts. Djugashvili had good organizational skills.

Djugashvili was in exile in Siberia during the momentous times of the March Revolution and the October Bolshevik coup d'etat. He was released from Siberia and came to Moscow where Lenin had transferred the capital from St. Petersburg. It was not ordained that he would have any significant role in the government. It was only Lenin's selection of him as Minister of National Minorities that gave him a role.

The structure of the Communist Party was that there was a Politburo (Political Bureau) that debated and set policy and an Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) that managed the party apparatus. Once the Politburo decided on policy someone had to convey the orders to the people in the Orgburo for them to implement the policy. The laison between the Politburo and the Orgburo was from the inception of Bolshevik government was Joseph Stalin. It was not a glamourous assignment, but Stalin recognized its potential for power. Later the Politburo made Stalin General Secretary of the Communist Party. Without realizing it the Politburo handed the levers of power for the Soviet Union to Joseph Stalin. Stalin immediately started aggrandizing his power. Friends and followers he put into positions of power in the hierarchy of the Communist Party. Those that countered him were transferred out of Moscow to distant assignments. This threat brought the other party members into line.

In his position as General Secretary Stalin had a degree of power over the functioning of the Politburo. He could set the agenda and provide copies of background papers for the Politburo.

Physically Stalin was not an imposing figure. He was about five foot four inches in height. His left arm was weakend from a childhood illness and he did not have full use of it. He spoke Russian with a Georgian accent. His face was pock-marked from small pox.

The other members of the Politburo did not consider Stalin a serious contendor for power. It was as if the Clinton administration had included a short, handicapped Puerto Rican. The other members would not have taken him to be a serious rival.

George Kennan, the American expert on Russia and archtect of much of American policy toward the Soviet Union said of Stalin:

Stalin's greatness as a dissimulator was an integral part of his greatness as a statesman. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious facade.

Stalin's Childhood

The man whom the world would come to know as Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, on December 21, 1879, in the Georgian province of Tiflis (Tbilisi) in the village of Gori, a small town in the southern reaches of the vast Russian Empire. He was the third child born to Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a poor shoemaker, and his wife Yekaterina, who augmented her husband's income by working as a domestic servant. However, the young Iosif was the only one of their offspring to survive infancy. Vissarion was an abusive, hard-drinking man, who eventually failed as an independent artisan and left his family to work in a factory in Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, when his son was five years old. For the rest of Stalin's childhood, Joseph and Yekaterina lived in the home of a priest, Father Charkviani, where the pious, hard-working woman attempted to ensure that her only son would be well-educated enough to escape the drudgery of a lower-class existence.
Georgia was a mountainous region, which at the time of Stalin's birth had been under the rule of the Tsar for only about fifty years. Like other great despots such as the Austrian-born German ruler Adolph Hitler and the Corsican-born French leader Napol�on Bonaparte (originally Napoleone di Buonaparte) , Stalin was an outsider, a provincial in the empire he came to rule. Georgians possessed their own culture and language, which was radically different from the official Russian of the empire, and the young Stalin only began learning Russian when he was nine years old. Years later, at the height of his power, he still spoke with a pronounced Georgian accent, and while he boasted that he had forgotten the language of his birth, it is reported that in his last years his ability to speak Russian deteriorated, and he spoke only in Georgian.
In other ways in his early life, Stalin retained pieces of his native culture--during his early days as a revolutionary, he took the name "Koba," after a legendary Georgian bandit who was the hero of a popular novel. But Stalin never showed any partiality to Georgia politically: he generally treated it, in his own words, as merely a "little piece of Soviet territory called Georgia."
Culturally separate as it was, one institution that Stalin's birthplace shared with the larger Russian Empire was the Orthodox Church; indeed, Georgia actually converted to Christianity more than 500 years before Russia. The Church played a strong role in his early life: he lived with a priest, and his schooling was religious. His mother enrolled him in the Gori Church School in September 1888, when her son was nine, and he graduated six years later, despite various interruptions. (One of these interruptions lasted a whole year: Stalin's father took the young boy to Tiflis to work alongside him in a shoe factory. Vissarion seems to have intended this as a permanent career for his son, but his mother intervened, and succeeded in bringing her son home to Gori. Thereafter his father was never a strong presence in Stalin's life--he would die before World War I, although the exact date is uncertain.) Stalin was a somewhat misshapen and diminutive boy: smallpox left his face scarred and pitted for the rest of his life, and a case of blood poisoning caused his left arm to grow shorter than his right; in a school photograph he appears considerably smaller than the boys around him. (Indeed, he would never cut a very imposing figure--he grew to just five feet four inches, and for the rest of his life his shortness rankled him, causing him to resort to platform shoes and other devices in an effort to appear taller than he actually was.) However, Stalin received excellent grades, and distinguished himself in the school choir. He seems to have loved reading, devouring the classics of Georgian literature as well as adventure novels, and he had a passion for the outdoors, spending days climbing in the wild, mountainous countryside around Gori. Thus he was ardent and energetic, and developed physical strength despite his short arm and small stature. He was swarthy, too, and contemporaries described his eyes as being yellowish--many compared them to the eyes of a tiger. Stalin graduated from the church school in July 1894, near the top of his class. He had a reputation for being callous toward his fellow students, and had been in trouble with the school authorities a few times, but there were no other signs of the direction his career was to take. Indeed, he seems to have been a pious young man--unsurprising, given his upbringing. At his mother's urging, he applied for and won a small scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he enrolled in September 1894. The Seminary was for children of priests and the priest that Stalin's family lived with had to register Joseph as his son in order for Joseph to attend.
Yekaterina worked hard to afford the tuition, and she nourished a strong hope that her son would become a priest. Indeed, even years later, when Stalin ruled all of Russia, she told an interviewer that she would have preferred for him to have entered the priesthood. Russia, in retrospect, undoubtably would have preferred it as well.
When later time after time Stalin outsmarted Churchhill and Roosevelt people began wonder where Stalin got his cleverness from. The Georgian cobbler who was officially his father did not seem to have any notable intellectual talents that he could have passed on to Stalin. Stalin's mother seemed to be solid but undistinguished woman. What is notable about Stalin's mother, Ekaterina Gheladze, is that she was not Georgian but instead Ossetes. The Ossetes were the descendants of the Alans, a major tribe of the Sarmations, an ethnic group related to the Iranians.
The doubts about Stalin being the son of Vissarion Djugashvili led to the speculation about other sources for Stalin's genes.
The most notable such speculation was that Stalin's father was the Belorussian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky. The face of Joseph Stalin is almost identical to that of Nikolai Przhevalsky. Apparently Przhevalsky did stop off in the town of Gori in Georgia on his way to Tibet. According to the story, in Georgia he was hosted at the home of wealthy Georgian where Ekaterina Gheladze worked as a maid. According to the speculation Przhevalsky seduced Ekaterina and left her pregnant as he journeyed off to Tibet. According to the story the Georgian family (or Przhevalsky) to avoid scandal paid Vissarion Djugashvili a substantial amount of money for him to marry Ekaterina Gheladze and this was the source of the capital for him to have run a shoe-making business employing about thirty cobblers. He subsequently lost the business and later died in a drunken knife fight.
There appears to be no hard evidence for Przhevalsky being the father of Stalin. There was a city in Siberia that was named after Przhevalsky. The Bolsheviks changed the name after they came to power but Stalin later changed it back to Przhevalsky. However it would not be out of line for Stalin to deviously promote the notion that he was really Russian rather than Georgian.
The other purported biological father was the priest with whom Ekaterina and Joseph lived with for many years and who registered Joseph in the seminary as his son.

For Americans to understand what happened in the Soviet Union it would be helpful to envision a continuation of the Godfather movie saga in which Michael Corleone decides to go into politics. After bankrolling the Democratic Party for a number of years Michael is given the chairmanship of the Party. Michael who is shrewd, ruthless and vengefull turns the party chairmanship into a political power base through which he rules the country. The venial regular politicians are no match for him. He changes his name from Michael Corleone to Mike Steel. He never relents in destroying enemies or potential enemies.
To make the analogy fit chronologically suppose it was Michael's father Vito Corleone who decided to go in to politics and became one to the special interest groups supporting the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and Roosevelt arranges for the Mafioso Vito Corleone to be the chairman of the Democratic Party. A talented and ruthless Mafioso would have no trouble disposing of his political rivals in the Party and when the beloved leader Roosevelt dies he would, to everyone's surprise, emerge as Roosevelt's successor. A Vito Steel would have no problem turning the near-one party state of Roosevelt into a real one party state and rule the rest of his life. (Those who think the notion of Mafiosos having influence at the top level of the Democratic Party is too farfetched should remember the ties of John Kennedy to Mafia figures through his father, Joseph Kennedy.)
In his early manhood Joseph Stalin became a gang leader who financed Lenin's operations with the proceeds of bank robberies, kidnapping and extortions. He was called a revolutionary but he was not much different than a Mafioso and the Georgian culture of revenge and retribution was not much different from that of the Sicilian.
Stalin's life as a gang leader began when he and about forty other boys from the Seminary were expelled. Stalin organized a protection racket extorting money from local businesses.
(To be continued.)

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