What did Gaidar talk about? In the niche of children's literature, Gaidar escaped censorship
The name of I.V. Stalin, who stood at the head of the USSR for almost 30 years (from the mid-20s to 1953), is associated with a large and controversial period in the history of our country. Victory in the Great Patriotic War is associated with this name. Patriotic War, the transformation of Russia from a backward peasant country into a country with advanced science and developed industrial production, the emergence atomic weapons as a protective and restraining force. Also, the name of Stalin is strongly associated with mass political repression, the practice of imprisonment and physical destruction of dissenters and dissidents, a complete lack of freedom in all spheres of life.
But many people familiar with history know that the real name of this man is not Stalin at all, but Dzhugashvili. Stalin is a political pseudonym. Why then Stalin - Stalin?
The same Dzhugashvili had 22 pseudonyms. Why was Stalin called Stalin?
Why did Stalin take such a pseudonym?
There are no historical sources that give a clear answer to this question. Historians can only guess. The most common versions:
- Stalin is translation from Georgian to Russian surname Dzhugashvili. Indeed, in ancient Georgian “dzhuga” means steel, “shvili” means son. Literally Dzhugashvili is the son of steel.
- Many Russian revolutionaries chose Russian-language pseudonyms, showing their determination and firmness in the struggle for revolutionary ideals. In addition to Stalin, there were also, for example, Molotov (Scriabin), Kamenev (Rosenfeld).
- When choosing a pseudonym, Dzhugashvili was guided by the surname real person- E. S. Stalinsky, a populist by conviction, author of the Russian translation of the poem “The Knight in tiger skin".
Stalin turned out to be an extremely successful pseudonym. It accurately describes the character of its bearer (inflexibility and flexibility, like steel), is easy to pronounce in any language, and is close to the pseudonym of the Bolshevik leader Lenin. It is no coincidence that Dzhugashvili entered history not under his real name, but under his pseudonym.
Historian Olga Edelman told why revolutionaries got their party nicknames, how they came up with them, and how Koba turned into.
Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky - people who bore these names are very familiar to us. But we rarely remember that not one of them was born with such an entry in their passport, because all of these are pseudonyms.
However, they became so entrenched in their bearers that famous revolutionaries remained in history under fictitious names: school textbooks are full of them, they are engraved on monuments, and, in the end, they are the names of streets and cities.
IN AND. Lenin and I.V. Stalin in Gorki. 1922
But why did Dzhugashvili become Stalin, and Ulyanov - Lenin? Did the Bolsheviks only need intricate nicknames for secrecy? Who were the role models for future leaders and whose names did they borrow? The candidate spoke about this and much more in an interview with the History.RF portal historical sciences, Leading Specialist State Archive RF Olga Edelman.
To confuse the gendarmes
- Olga, tell us why revolutionaries in Russia needed nicknames?
Nicknames were needed for conspiracy. For the same reason - conspiratorial - a revolutionary could simultaneously use several nicknames: one was used for communication in the underground environment, another served as an author's pseudonym, some more for one-time communication, so as not to “expose” the main one, another one was used at a party congress, etc. . d. They were deliberately separated to make it more difficult for the gendarmes to identify the actor. certain place underground worker with a participant in the congress and the author of articles in party periodicals. In addition, illegal immigrants used fake or other people’s passports, so sometimes they called themselves a false name.
L.D. Trotsky at a military parade
Why did many former underground fighters keep their pseudonyms even when they no longer needed to hide from the police? This is what the most famous party leaders did: Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky...
After the revolution, those pseudonyms by which a person became known were preserved, and most often these were author's pseudonyms. Lenin and Trotsky became widely known as publicists, so they preferred to keep these names as surnames. Thus, “Lenin” is, first of all, an author’s pseudonym, and this is how Vladimir Ulyanov signed articles. Similarly - Maxim Gorky, whose real name and patronymic (Alexei Maksimovich) were completely stuck together with his pseudonymous surname.
From Soso to Stalin
Tell us a little about Stalin. After all, the leader of the peoples did not always use this surname? What other pseudonyms did Joseph Vissarionovich have?
Joseph Dzhugashvili on early stages of his illegal work was simply called Soso. This is a friendly, homely form of the name Joseph, that is, something like Kolya and Sasha for Russian names. Then he came up with the nickname Koba, by which he became known in the Transcaucasian party underground (Koba, the hero of Alexander Kazbegi’s adventure story “The Patricide”, is considered a favorite literary character Stalin. - Note ed.). Lived with false passports in the name of Kayos Nizheradze and so on. After the revolution of 1905, when relatively many freedoms appeared, he began to sign articles “Koba”, “Ko...”, “K.” - readers guessed who wrote it. Since 1910, Dzhugashvili began to sign articles with variants - “K. St.", "K.S."
I.V. Stalin. 1902
- When did Koba finally turn into Stalin?
Nickname "K. Stalin” gained a foothold only at the beginning of 1913, shortly before Dzhugashvili’s arrest and exile to Turukhansk. At the 4th and 5th congresses of the RSDLP he was “Ivanovich”, and in St. Petersburg in 1912 the party nickname was Vasily, Vasiliev, and only a narrow circle knew that “Vasily” was “Koba”.
Romantic image of a fighter
I heard that sometimes the party nickname was a kind of key to the code and was used in secret correspondence. This is true?
I haven’t seen them used as a key to a cipher, and it’s unlikely that such a thing has happened. But it is true that party nicknames were used in correspondence. Moreover, sometimes Lenin and Krupskaya used two nicknames in the same letter, so that the gendarmes saw double. For example, in a letter addressed to “Vasiliev”, instructions were given to “Vaska” in the third person, as if he were another person. Or a letter to Vladimir Ivanovich Nevsky (Russian revolutionary, Bolshevik, historian. - Note ed.) Lenin addressed to him real name Krivobokov also mentioned Spitsa in the third person - one of Nevsky’s nicknames (Nevsky is also a nickname).
IN AND. Nevsky
- On what basis were pseudonyms chosen?
Some pseudonyms have a distinct “working” style: Kamenev, Molotov, and even Stalin. In addition, there is a reference to romantic image a strong, unbending fighter. Trotsky assured in his memoirs that he came up with this surname by chance, when, during his escape from exile, he needed to enter some name into a false passport (according to most historians, Leiba Bronstein chose a pseudonym for himself after Nikolai Trotsky, the senior warden of the Odessa prison where he was imprisoned in 1898 - Note ed.). Georgy Ordzhonikidze from the very beginning of his participation in revolutionary movement used the nickname Sergo, and Stepan Shaumyan - Suren and Surenin, in both cases it is just a name. There is a legend about the origin of the nickname Kamo, going back to himself, as if at the beginning of his career Soso Dzhugashvili nicknamed him that way, because Semyon Ter-Petrosyan spoke Russian poorly and once said “kamo” instead of “to whom”. “Oh, you “kamo”,” Soso teased him.
It is worth noting that aliases for famous people- quite a common thing, and in different times they were widely used by writers, musicians, actors and other representatives creative professions. Moreover, in most cases, pseudonyms have become so attached to their owners that many generations of fans of their talent perceive only these names, and some are even sure that they were given at birth.
L.D. Trotsky, V.I. Lenin, L.B. Kamenev
Meanwhile, such famous poets, like Anna Akhmatova, Sasha Cherny, prose writer Mark Aldanov, writer and screenwriter Ilya Ilf, poet and playwright Mikhail Svetlov and many others whose names you know are all pseudonyms. They can be perceived in different ways, since pseudonyms are always masks, and their purposes vary depending on the goals of the bearer. Sometimes this mask is designed to hide some secret sides of a personality or obscure part of its history, sometimes to embellish the truth, create an atmosphere of mystery, sometimes to emphasize some key qualities of a person with the help of which he wants to stand out. One way or another, each person has the right to choose a name for himself, under which he will become known to his contemporaries and descendants. While the name given at birth remains with him forever.
Joseph Stalin died 63 years ago - on March 5, 1953, however, despite this, his biography is still full of gaps and dark spots. Especially it concerns pre-revolutionary period leader's life. Why did this happen and how can we explain the appearance of unreliable versions? Olga Edelman, candidate of historical sciences, researcher at the State Archives of the Russian Federation, author of the study “Stalin, Koba and Soso. Young Stalin in historical sources."
Stalin in 1918. Tsaritsyn Front
Book Olga Edelman It starts off very intriguing. Already on the first pages, the author writes that young Stalin looks “like one big hoax: a man with an invented last name, confusion with his date of birth, doubts about nationality (Georgians or Ossetians?), a cascade of false names and documents, rumors about certain dark spots in past". To begin with, we decided to deal with the invented surname...
Nicknames, pseudonyms, nicknames
– When did Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili become Soso, Soso became Koba, and Koba became Stalin?
– Soso is childhood nickname Dzhugashvili. Diminutive name from Joseph. Then, already at initial stage his revolutionary activities, Dzhugashvili began to use this name as one of his party nicknames. In April 1902, he was arrested for the first time for organizing a demonstration in Batum. In the fall of 1903, he was sent into exile to the village of Novaya Uda, Balagansky district, Irkutsk province.
Dzhugashvili soon fled from there, after which he became Koba. In the novel by Alexander Kazbegi, this name was given to a romantic robber, a kind of Caucasian Robin Hood. Perhaps it was in honor of this hero that in 1904 Dzhugashvili, returning to the Caucasus, took the nickname Koba. And his most famous pseudonym, Stalin, appeared much later, in 1912. And first with the initial K. - K. Stalin. I think Koba was meant.
I note that the revolutionaries of the early twentieth century had many nicknames - for different occasions. There was a party nickname by which the revolutionary was known to his fellow party members. At the same time, there could be a literary pseudonym. By the way, already in Turukhansk exile, having become Stalin, Dzhugashvili wrote about Stalin in the third person. So he tried to mislead the gendarmes so that they would not identify him with Stalin.
Under the pseudonym Ivanovich, he appeared in the protocols of the IV and V party congresses. As you can see, this pseudonym is not related to the party nickname. Finally, gendarmerie surveillance agents gave their nicknames to the revolutionaries. So in reality, the nicknames and pseudonyms of Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, of course, are not limited to the three named, the most famous...
– Now about the date of birth of Stalin. In the literature you can find two dates: the textbook one, included in official biography leader - December 9 (21), 1879 and another one - December 6 (18), 1878. Which one do you think is more reliable?
– More reasons to consider the correct date of birth Joseph Dzhugashvili December 6 (18), 1878. However, these and other dates can be found in his profiles. I think he himself was not very interested in knowing exactly when he was born. In general, the pre-revolutionary part of his biography is still little studied, replete with ambiguities, gaps, rumors and versions of varying degrees of fantasticality and unreliability. And this despite the fact that out of 74 s extra years More than half of his life - almost 39 - he lived under the “old regime”.
There is a clear disproportion: entire libraries of studies have been written about Stalin’s post-revolutionary period, but his activities as an underground revolutionary are still in the shadows. But he came to power with baggage life experience, with formed likes and dislikes. All this could not but affect the behavior of Stalin the leader...
Modesty adorns a person
– What is the reason for such a low degree of study of the issue?
– First of all, in order to study the pre-revolutionary period under a huge number Of various memories, we have very little evidence that can be unconditionally trusted. Those that exist are very specific: there is not a single category of sources about the young Stalin that would be a priori trustworthy. All memoirists wrote with some kind of political position. Roughly speaking, the authors were divided into outright enemies who accused Stalin of everything, and overzealous friends who assured that Stalin almost youth was in charge of everything.
Joseph Dzhugashvili was born in poor family shoemaker in the city of Gori, Tiflis province
In general, the life of Joseph Dzhugashvili, an illegal revolutionary, was such that it excluded the possibility of the existence of third-party, more or less objective and at the same time informed observers. He didn’t have any close people who were ready to talk about him. His comrades in power, those who knew him from his youth and in the underground, such as Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Vyacheslav Molotov, Mikhail Tskhakaya, did not leave memoirs about him. The memoirist closest to him is his daughter Svetlana. Her relationship with her father was complex, and it is clear that she was not an eyewitness to the events relating to his young years.
Stalin's youth was spent in the revolutionary underground, prisons and exile. Information card on I.V. Dzhugashvili from the archives of the secret police in St. Petersburg. Circa 1911
The reliability of the memoirists’ testimony can be verified using the information contained in the gendarmerie documents. However, sources originating from the depths of the gendarmerie department, for obvious reasons, often demonstrate the low awareness of their authors. How could it be otherwise, we were talking about a member of a well-conspiracy underground, who tried in every possible way to confuse the secret police. So, when studying Stalin’s biography, one has to confront several mutually exclusive versions of the same events at once and try to build a more or less consistent picture.
DZHUGASHVILI'S CHILDREN'S NICKNAME IS SOSO, A SMALL NAME OF JOSEPH. In 1904, it became Koba - in honor of the hero of the novel Alexander Kazbegi, who created the image of a kind of Caucasian Robin Hood. And the most famous pseudonym– Stalin – Dzhugashvili began to use since 1912
– One cannot ignore the natural secrecy of the research object itself...
– Indeed, it is difficult to name someone who could be considered an intimate friend of Koba. At the same time, during the life of Stalin himself, the facts of his biography, especially those relating to his youth, were not emphasized. There have been very few very sparse publications on this topic. Unlike Lenin, about whose childhood volumes were written at one time (there was a whole genre of literature about how “Lenin was little with a curly head”), there were no stories about “little Stalin.” In the archive I saw only a few manuscripts written by his childhood acquaintances. But these “biographies of the leader” were never published.
- Why?
– Stalin made it clear in every possible way that it was not good to stick oneself out, and did not encourage stories about his childhood and revolutionary youth. During the life of the leader it did not turn out to be complete scientific biography. Instead, Stalin directed his efforts towards publishing collected works. Which is pretty smart. This allowed us to avoid publication detailed biography and at the same time create a corpus of texts suitable for quotation.
– What, in your opinion, lay at the basis of this approach—actually modesty or the exaggerated secrecy of the leader?
– And secrecy too, but also calculation. In the 1920s, some old party members still spoke with delight about their revolutionary exploits, which, if I were Stalin, I would also have forbidden anyone to publish anything about. These are, for example, stories about how a tsarist secret police agent was cleverly stabbed to death right on the street. Or about how they stuffed a bomb.
The ruling party needs to have a decent appearance, but here it is almost a crime. In addition, those who came to power should not have given instructions to their enemies on how to fight the regime. And the experience of the Bolsheviks was the experience of just such a struggle.
Today, historians have no doubt that Eremin’s letter, on which Stalin’s accusations of connections with the Tsarist secret police were based, is a fake - Valentin Kuzmin / TASS
On December 13, 1931, Stalin had a very interesting conversation with German writer Emil Ludwig. The latter asked the leader the following question:
“You have decades of underground work behind you. You had to smuggle weapons, literature, etc. Don’t you think that the enemies of the Soviet regime could borrow your experience and fight Soviet power using the same methods?
Stalin responded lapidarily: “This, of course, is quite possible.”
Agree that it is somehow unreasonable to actually publish your own instructions on organizing underground work. Why should the authorities teach this to their potential opponents?
Finally, let's not forget: already in the 1920s, biographies of party leaders became an instrument of internal party struggle. While Stalin was moving to power, publications appeared in the press, for example, letters Yakova Sverdlova from Turukhansk exile about severe character Koba or letters from Stalin himself, where about what was started Lenin He speaks of the internal party conflict as a storm in a teacup.
Then it was compromising evidence. It is not surprising that, having established himself in power, by the early 1930s Stalin took strict control over everything that came out of the press regarding not only his own revolutionary past, but also the history of the party in general.
Provocateur, militant, criminal?
– Did you have to remember that any information could be used against you?
- Exactly. It would be clearly imprudent to reveal the details of one’s biography in the context of an acute internal party struggle, accompanied by a war of not just incriminating evidence, but often unfounded rumors being spread. And Stalin was in no hurry to do this...
– Stalin was often declared an agent of the tsarist secret police.
– It was common for the underground to look for provocateurs in their midst, and indeed there were many of them, especially in Caucasian organizations. However, everything archival searches They gave absolutely no reliable evidence of Joseph Dzhugashvili’s cooperation with the police, but there were many serious arguments that did not allow the development of such suspicions.
The voiced version is clearly refuted Zinaida Peregudova in her articles and book “Political Investigation of Russia. 1880–1917", published in 2000. After the publication of her works, there is no longer any reason to consider Stalin an agent of the tsarist secret police. Peregudova convincingly proved that the so-called “Eremin’s letter”, on which the accusations against Stalin are based ( long years this letter was passed off as part of the correspondence of gendarmerie officers), nothing more than a fake.
Future leaders Soviet state Joseph Stalin (in top row third from left) and Yakov Sverdlov (in the top row, third from right) in exile in the Turukhansk region. 1915
By the way, not only rumors that Stalin was an employee of the secret police became widespread. He was also accused of being an expropriating bandit, and also a terrible coward, avoiding danger at every opportunity. Of course, one can imagine combining a militant, an expropriator and a criminal in one person. But how could the same person also be a coward? Here we are at Once again We are faced with the complete inconsistency of Stalin’s enemies.
– Party comrades accused Stalin of participating in the so-called “Tiflis ex” of 1907, as a result of which the Bolsheviks took a gigantic sum for those times - 250 thousand rubles.
– At the same time, it was known that the “ex” organized Kamo ( Simon Ter-Petrosyan). And Stalin was blamed for the very action for which Kamo was considered a hero.
However, Koba did not directly participate in the ex. The names of all the militants who took part in it are known. They were caught and tried. Dzhugashvili was not among them. And it’s clear why: by that time he had already become a prominent party leader. And he had someone to send to the task. Let's say, the same Kamo, with whom they were fellow countrymen. I can’t believe that Koba himself ran with bombs. But Dzhugashvili could and most likely had something to do with sending money abroad to Vladimir Lenin.
– How right are those who molded Stalin into an inveterate militant?
– U Fazil Iskander in the novel “Sandro from Chegem”, based on one of the short stories Yuri Kara shot the sensational film “The Feast of Belshazzar, or a Night with Stalin” in the late 1980s, Koba is presented as an inveterate militant. But this fiction, based on rumors, the origins of which, apparently, should be sought in the same party squabbles of the early 1920s.
We know, let me remind you, that Joseph Dzhugashvili had a defect in the shoulder and elbow joints of his left hand. They write different things about the origin of this injury. However, we do not have reliable information about when and under what circumstances young Joseph injured his hand. This is not surprising: no one thought to document what happened to the boy from the dysfunctional family of a poor shoemaker.
But I seriously doubt that a man with a withered hand could be a militant. In addition, there is famous photograph, where we see young Joseph with his classmates. In this photo, Soso is standing in the last row at the edge. And he is perhaps the smallest and thinnest of all. Could a frail young man with a withered hand become an inveterate terrorist? I think no. His strength lay elsewhere: he took advantage of his intelligence and ability to manipulate people, the ability to be a behind-the-scenes puppeteer.
Revolutionary racket in Baku
– Is there any confirmation in the sources that Stalin extorted money for the party from Baku oil industrialists? That is, he was engaged in banal racketeering?
– All revolutionary parties were involved in extorting money from Baku oil industrialists. It really was a revolutionary racket. It is known, for example, that the father of the future academician Lev Landau paid money to the Baku committee of the RSDLP, which included Stalin. For Baku at that time, this situation was the norm.
– How and why did this happen?
“Life around the oil fields was difficult. Baku is a kind of Kuwait at the beginning of the twentieth century. The city grew very quickly. Life there was incredibly colorful. There were many temporary workers at the oil fields - from among the surrounding peasants who came to earn money. There were also subjects of Persia among them. For the police, everyone looked the same. They come and go.
The local police and administration were unable to cope with the influx of non-resident population. Production was not stable. Industrialists received an order for a certain volume of oil and recruited temporary workers. As soon as the order was completed, the workers were dismissed until the next time. In this circulation of human flows, the revolutionaries lived almost openly and felt calm.
Simon Ter-Petrosyan, better known under the nickname Kamo, was one of the organizers of the famous “Tiflis ex” on June 12 (25), 1907 - TASS Photo Chronicle
Baku gendarmes reported that they could not keep track of the revolutionaries because the spies were being killed. They killed not only the spies, but also all unwanted “outsiders.” Late travelers were regularly killed. The crime rate was extremely high.
Of course, the oil owners had security from local bandits. But oil fields are quite fragile thing. A worker could, as it were, accidentally drop a bucket into the well - and thus he would take it out of use for a long time. Unrest in the fields was fraught with arson. Therefore, the oil industrialists understood that they could not quarrel with anyone: neither with their workers, nor with anyone else. As a result, everyone agreed with everyone.
By the way, it was after the general strike in Baku in December 1904, in the organization of which Dzhugashvili took some part (but did not lead it, as his apologists wrote), that the first collective agreement in the history of Russia was concluded between workers and entrepreneurs.
– There were several revolutionary parties in Russia. If you pay everyone, you will go broke. Why did the Social Democrats take money?
– We have no direct evidence of this. What exactly did the RSDLP take money for? Maybe because there won't be a strike. Or maybe for the fact that it will be. The same strike of 1904 was organized neither by the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks, but by the Shendrikov group [created in August 1904 in Baku by the brothers Leo, Ilya And Gleb Shendrikov the group was called the Organization of Balakhani and Bibiheybat Workers, and from 1905 – the Union of Baku Workers. – "Historian"].
The Shendrikovs were populists. The Bolsheviks were outraged that they led workers to set fire to industries and called for violence. A prominent Baku Social Democrat at that time was Vladimir Noskov(Glebov). He said that people from industrialists came to him and offered him first 30 thousand rubles, and then 50 thousand for the strike to continue for another two weeks. The strike in the fields had a magical effect on rising prices. So now it is difficult to understand who paid whom and for what.
Was the archives cleaned?
– You can often hear that Stalin, having become a leader, allegedly cleaned out the archives, hiding or even destroying documents about his past...
“They were convinced of this in emigrant circles, because they believed in the veracity of the rumors that Stalin was an agent of the tsarist secret police and a criminal. Naturally, emigrant authors could not get into Soviet archives and they only said that in the USSR, of course, they destroyed all the inconvenient documents. But from our archivists, who kept and are storing the archives of the Police Department, I have not heard anything like this.
In our archives, employees work for a long time, they come with a fresh college diploma and stay for life, they are not in a hurry to retire, they are very faithful to their profession. Therefore, there is continuity " oral tradition» about what happened in the institution more than half a century ago.
So everything is simple: you need to ask distinguished employees, and if they themselves have not witnessed certain events, then they must have heard about them from their senior colleagues. For example, in this way - not first-hand, but second-hand - we know how the evacuation of archives during the war took place. But the “archival legend” does not talk about any purges of pre-revolutionary police funds.
In the late 1980s, film director Yuri Kara made the film “The Feasts of Belshazzar, or a Night with Stalin,” in which the “father of nations” in his youth is shown as an inveterate militant
– After all, this is a very difficult task - to clean the archives so that it is not noticeable. In addition, only professionals can do this: it is difficult for the party chief to find documents to be confiscated.
- Let's try to imagine a dictator at the apogee of power, instructing someone to find and seize documents about his cooperation with the secret police. That is, it is assumed that the suspicious and cunning Stalin directly into the hands of one of his comrades (and at the same time his rivals) gives such compromising material about himself? The archival system was then entirely subordinated to the NKVD.
Who should Stalin have sent? Nikolai Yezhov? Or Beria? Is it really smart and cunning? Lavrentiy Beria, to whom he entrusted archival research on the history of party organizations in Transcaucasia? By the way, this fact alone means that Stalin did not feel any dark past behind him, which had to be reliably hidden. Because, obviously, Beria is the first one whom it made sense to beware of.
Further, Beria himself would not have gone to the archives - if only because he could not have discovered there on his own, without the help of archivists. necessary documents among tens of thousands of storage units. This means that a whole team of proven employees of state security agencies, and at the same time archival employees helping them, had to participate in the search for documents incriminating the leader. Well, how can this be? Stalin was certainly not stupid.
Even if he had assumed that in the depths of the archives there might be something that cast a shadow on him, he, like any somewhat prudent dictator (and Stalin was more than prudent), would have preferred to simply limit as much as possible the access of the curious to the relevant folders and shelves, but would not make their contents available to representatives of literally the entire hierarchical system of the NKVD.
Smart Bolshevik
– What role did Stalin play in the Bolshevik party before 1917?
– By the beginning of the First Russian Revolution, he became a prominent figure in Transcaucasia. But Stalin was not elected to the Third Party Congress in the spring of 1905. A year later, he found himself a delegate to the IV Congress of the RSDLP, although his mandate was disputed. Stalin became a national figure around 1912. At this time he had a good contact with Lenin.
– Thanks to what qualities did Stalin make his career as a revolutionary?
– It seems to me that we overestimate many of Stalin’s party comrades. Among them there were indeed some bright people. But compared to many Bolsheviks, Stalin looks like one of the most intelligent. Take, for example, the publication of the newspaper Pravda: it was not immediately possible to establish it. Lenin sent to St. Petersburg angry letters, but there was no result until Ilyich instructed Stalin and Sverdlov to take over the newspaper. And then things started to happen.
You need to understand that among the underground there were not many people capable of organizing something. Who did the revolutionary underground consist of? Mainly from dropout students and high school students. And if we take the Caucasus, then they were not even real Marxists, they simply did not really know the theory. Works Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels were not translated into Georgian, and therefore Transcaucasian revolutionaries used “amateur” abstracts.
People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrentiy Beria - RIA Novosti
Don't overestimate these guys. These were people who did not fit into legal life, did not find a place for themselves in it and did not have a good profession. Clearly this was a problem Russian Empire, which has pushed too many young people to the margins. Remember Chekhov's image dropout student. The revolutionary underground made it possible for these eternal students stop being extra people and even gaining a certain status of respected people allowed them to realize their ambitions.
Who would Stalin be in legal life? A village teacher or a village priest. After all, the money for Joseph to receive higher education, the family didn’t have one. In this sense, his choice of the revolutionary path is quite obvious.
– Stalin is often reproached for being a tongue-tied and inexpressive speaker...
– Stalin was a speaker adequate to the tasks facing him. And Leon Trotsky, for example, called him a bad speaker - his worst enemy for many decades.
Meanwhile, the phenomenon of Stalin’s career was not based on anything other than popularity among the workers of Transcaucasia. He had no starting advantages. There was no group that would support and promote it. If we talk about Stalin’s early texts, they are tongue-tied, viscous, long (by the way, the works of many other revolutionaries are written simply monstrously from the point of view of journalism). But subsequent texts demonstrate the growth of Stalin the propagandist. It is clear that he was learning to write more clearly and intelligibly.
As a result, Stalin found his own language and style of presenting information. The workers who listened to him said that they liked Soso because he “didn’t look like an intellectual.” Dzhugashvili did not make hours-long speeches and did not use learned words, the meaning of which the workers did not understand. They were impressed that he was dressed approximately the same as them, and that he behaved on an equal footing with them. In communication with ordinary people Stalin was often interested in how they lived, what worried them and what worried them. He knew how to find an approach to people. And in public debates with the Mensheviks he liked to speak last. Unlike them, he spoke concisely and clearly, and the workers voted for him.
- IN mature years Stalin was distinguished by the fact that he read a lot and knew well world literature, had an excellent memory and a tenacious mind. But it would seem that neither childhood spent on the outskirts of the empire in the family of a poor Georgian shoemaker, nor youth spent in the revolutionary underground contributed to the formation of such qualities and interests.
– An important feature of Stalin, which is often forgotten, is that he was an incredibly “self-taught” man. Born in poverty Georgian family, Joseph Dzhugashvili learned Russian, in which he later read a lot throughout his life. At the Tiflis Seminary he received a decent liberal arts education, but in the field of natural sciences his education was not so good. Joseph also tried to teach foreign languages, German and French. However, nothing worked out with them.
In Baku at the beginning of the twentieth century, many revolutionary parties found sources of funding
When Dzhugashvili was studying at the seminary, according to entries in the journal, he was subject to penalties for regularly taking books and legal newspapers from the city library that were not permitted for seminarians (that is, let us note, not illegal literature, but what was prohibited by the seminary authorities). Once he was punished for reading Victor Hugo. It is noteworthy that Dzhugashvili’s classmates were punished for fighting, getting drunk, smoking and rowdying.
Memoir revenge
– When Stalin became the leader, he was praised, when at the 20th Congress the cult of his personality was debunked, at first they began to scold him, and then they kept silent about a lot. During the years of perestroika, they wrote about him exclusively in a negative way. The political situation had an effect, not only here, but also in the West...
– Abroad, the first books about Stalin appeared in the 1930s. They were part of political journalism and laid down traditions that still exist today. Western scientists were faced with an acute shortage of information: Soviet archives, of course, were inaccessible to them, and official historical party publications aroused distrust. So they were based primarily on emigrant memoirs (primarily Georgian Mensheviks); the stories of Stalin's political and often personal opponents seemed to them more objective, because at least it was not false apologetics.
Museum I.V. Stalin in Gori. Georgia
That is why the books “Portraits of Revolutionaries” and “Stalin” enjoyed enormous authority. Leon Trotsky- a major party figure, aware of many, if not all, of the intricacies. However, what could Lev Davidovich know about Stalin’s pre-revolutionary past? Just what everyone was talking about. Trotsky was not a member of the Bolshevik faction and until 1917 saw Dzhugashvili only briefly in Vienna.
The information vacuum gave rise to increased interest in dubious documents of various kinds, including such as Eremin’s letter, which we have already discussed, or the memoirs of an NKVD officer who fled to the West Alexandra Orlova. The latter, in particular, said that a folder from the secret safe of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs allegedly fell into his hands, which contained documents confirming Stalin's connection with the secret police. Currently, authoritative researchers of Stalinism are convinced that Orlov’s memoirs are not trustworthy.
The nature of the denunciations made by the defectors is understandable. It is quite obvious that they were guided by the conjuncture, the demand for anti-Soviet speeches that existed in the West at that time, and took advantage of the fact that it was impossible to verify or refute their words.
– But such “memoirs” were very popular among Western, and then also among our perestroika authors. Why?
– Western biographers of Stalin, relying on the emigrant tradition, for some reason believed that enemies should judge and talk about him more objectively than friends and adherents. And for many years in our country, it was customary to accept any critical remark addressed to Stalin with complete confidence, and a priori consider everything written in a laudatory manner to be completely falsified. By the way, often behind exaggerated praise there are real facts, only greatly inflated.
Meanwhile, each time, from my point of view, one should pay attention to the personality of the critic himself. What goals did he set, what relationship connected him with Stalin? Thus, the Mensheviks who found themselves in the West often not only distorted the facts, but also directly slandered Stalin. There were also those who, having lost to him in the political struggle, tried to take revenge on the pages of their “memoirs” and even tried to literally rewrite the unsuccessful episodes of their own biography...
Interviewed by Vladimir Rudakov and Oleg Nazarov
Russian Revolution
How did it happen that an ordinary teenager from the provincial Georgian village of Gori became the “head of the people”? We decided to look at what factors contributed to the fact that Koba, who lived in robbery, became Joseph Stalin.
Father factor
Father's upbringing plays a big role in a man's maturation. Joseph Dzhugashvili was actually deprived of it. Koba's official father, shoemaker Vissarion Dzhugashvili, drank a lot. Ekaterina Geladze divorced him when her son was 12 years old.
The paternity of Vissarion Dzhugashvili is still disputed by historians. Simon Montefiori, in his book “Young Stalin,” writes about three “contenders” for this role: wine merchant Yakov Ignatashvili, Gori police chief Damian Davrichui and priest Christopher Charkviani.
Childhood trauma
Stalin's character as a child was seriously affected by the trauma he received at the age of twelve: Joseph was injured in a road accident left hand, over time it became shorter and weaker than the right one. Due to his withered hands, Koba could not fully participate in youthful fights; he could only win them with the help of cunning. A hand injury prevented Kobe from learning to swim. Joseph also suffered from smallpox at the age of five and barely survived, after which he developed his first “special mark”: “a pockmarked face with smallpox marks.”
The feeling of physical inferiority affected Stalin's character. Biographers note the vindictiveness of young Koba, his temper, secrecy and penchant for conspiracy.
Relationship with mother
Stalin's relationship with his mother was difficult. They wrote letters to each other, but met rarely. When the mother visited her son in last time, this happened a year before her death, in 1936, she expressed regret that he never became a priest. Stalin was only amused by this. When his mother died, Stalin did not go to the funeral, only sent a wreath with the inscription “To my dear and beloved mother from her son Joseph Dzhugashvili.”
Such a cool relationship between Stalin and his mother can be explained by the fact that Ekaterina Georgievna was an independent person and was never shy in her assessments. For the sake of her son, when Joseph was neither Koba nor Stalin, she learned to cut and sew, mastered the profession of a milliner, but she did not have enough time to raise her son. Joseph grew up on the street.
Birth of Koba
The future Stalin had many party nicknames. He was called “Osip”, “Ivanovich”, “Vasiliev”, “Vasily”, but the most famous nickname of young Joseph Dzhugashvili was Koba. It is significant that Mikoyan and Molotov addressed Stalin this way even in the 1930s. Why Koba?
Literature influenced. One of the young revolutionary’s favorite books was the novel “The Patricide” by the Georgian writer Alexander Kazbegi. This is a book about the struggle of mountain peasants for their independence. One of the heroes of the novel - the intrepid Koba - also became a hero for the young Stalin, who, after reading the book, began to call himself Koba.
Women
In the book “Young Stalin” by British historian Simon Montefiore, the author claims that Koba was very loving in his youth. Montefiore, however, does not consider this to be anything special; this way of life, the historian writes, was characteristic of revolutionaries.
Montefiore claims that Koba’s mistresses included peasant women, noblewomen, and party comrades (Vera Schweitzer, Valentina Lobova, Lyudmila Stal).
The British historian also claims that two peasant women from Siberian villages (Maria Kuzakova, Lidiya Pereprygina), where Koba was serving his exile, gave birth to sons from him, whom Stalin never recognized.
Despite such turbulent relationships with women, Koba’s main business was, of course, the revolution. In his interview with Ogonyok magazine, Simon Montefiore commented on the information he obtained: “ Worthy of respect Only party comrades were considered. Love and family were expelled from life, which should have been devoted only to the revolution. What seems immoral and criminal in their behavior to us did not matter to them.”
"Exes"
Today it is already well known that Koba in his youth did not disdain illegal activities. Koba showed particular zeal during expropriations. At the Bolshevik congress in Stockholm in 1906, the so-called “exes” were banned; a year later, at the London congress, this decision was confirmed. It is significant that the congress in London ended on June 1, 1907, and the most sensational robbery of two State Bank carriages, organized by Koba Ivanovich, occurred later - on June 13. Koba did not comply with the demands of the congress for the reason that he considered them Menshevik; on the issue of “ex”, he took the position of Lenin, who approved them.
During the mentioned robbery, Koba’s group managed to get 250 thousand rubles. 80 percent of this money was sent to Lenin, the rest went to the needs of the cell.
Stalin's not-so-clean reputation could become an obstacle to his advancement in the future. In 1918, the head of the Mensheviks, Yuli Martov, published an article in which he gave three examples of Koba’s illegal activities: the robbery of State Bank carriages in Tiflis, the murder of a worker in Baku, and the seizure of the steamship “Nicholas I” in Baku.
Moreover, Martov even wrote that Stalin had no right to hold government positions, since he was expelled from the party in 1907. Stalin was furious at this article; he claimed that this exclusion was illegal, since it was carried out by the Tiflis cell, controlled by the Mensheviks. That is, Stalin still did not deny the fact of his exclusion. But he threatened Martov with a revolutionary tribunal.
Why "Stalin"?
Throughout his life, Stalin had three dozen pseudonyms. At the same time, it is significant that Joseph Vissarionovich did not make a secret of his surname. Who now remembers Apfelbaum, Rosenfeld and Wallach (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Litvinov)? But Ulyanov-Lenin and Dzhugashvili-Stalin are well known. Stalin chose the pseudonym quite deliberately. According to William Pokhlebkin, who devoted his work “The Great Pseudonym” to this issue, several factors coincided when choosing a pseudonym. The real source when choosing a pseudonym was the surname of a liberal journalist, first close to the populists and then to the Socialist Revolutionaries, Evgeniy Stefanovich Stalinsky, one of the prominent Russian professional publishers of periodicals in the province and translator into Russian of Sh. Rustaveli’s poem “The Knight in the Skin of the Tiger.” Stalin loved this poem very much. There is also a version that Stalin took a pseudonym based on the name of one of his mistresses, party comrades Lyudmila Stal.
