Stalin & Cupid

The Red Tsar and poetry

The Guardian

As a teenager, Stalin had a surprising talent for romantic poetry. Simon Sebag Montefiore wonders how the youthful scribbler became such a ruthless tyrant.
Young Stalin Simon Sebag MontefioreWeidenfeld and Nicolson, pp 432, £25Before he was a revolutionary, Stalin was known as a poet. In 1895, aged 17 and studying for the priesthood in Georgia, a province of the tsarist empire, he took a selection of his poems to show to the country’s most famous editor and national hero, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze. The prince was deeply impressed with both the poems and the poet, whom he called that “young man with the burning eyes”. After looking through the verses, he chose five to publish in Iveria (an archaic name for Georgia), Russia’s most fashionable and prestigious literary journal. It took someone of the young Stalin’s ambition and colossal self-confidence to walk into the prince’s office and offer his poems for publication.When printed, they were widely read and much admired. They became minor Georgian classics, to be published in anthologies and memorised by schoolchildren until the 1970s (and not as part of Stalin’s cult; they were usually published as ‘Anonymous’).Stalin was no Georgian Pushkin. The poems’ romantic imagery is derivative, but their beauty lies in the rhythm and language. Poetry remained a part of Stalin’s life right up to and even during his three decades as tyrant, leading him to protect some poets and destroy others.Chavchavadze, Stalin’s patron, was a Georgian aristocrat, literary aesthete and respected writer, a romantic believer in an independent Georgia ruled by an enlightened nobility. The teenage student of the priesthood, then known as Josef ‘Soso’ Djugashvili, was a cobbler’s son from a notoriously violent provincial town who had overcome paternal beatings, street fights, several almost fatal accidents and illnesses to enter the Tiflis seminary, one of the finest educational establishments south of Moscow. It was an oppressive boarding school offering a classical and Orthodox education, not unlike an English Victorian public school. Intellectually precocious, the 10-year-old Stalin wrote verses instead of letters to his friends.‘Noble’ verseHe was raised, like all Georgians, on the national epic, “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin” by Shota Rustaveli, which he knew by heart. As a child, Stalin immersed himself in all the popular poems, especially those by two other aristocrats and national heroes, Prince Rafael Eristavi (his favourite poet) and Akaki Tsereteli. At the seminary, the would-be priest worked on his romantic poems until he was confident enough to show them to Chavchavadze. The chosen five soon appeared in Iveria, published under his nickname ‘Soselo’. Soselo was admired as a poet before anyone had ever heard of ‘Stalin’, the name he did not coin until 1912. Deda Ena— the popular children’s anthology of Georgian verse— included Stalin’s first published poem, ‘Morning’, in its 1916 edition, where it remained (sometimes ascribed to Stalin, sometimes not) up to the days of Brezhnev. The scans and rhymes of ‘Morning’ work perfectly, but it was Soselo’s fusion of Persian, Byzantine and Georgian imagery that won plaudits.His next poem, a crazed ode called ‘To the Moon’, reveals more of the poet: a violent, tragically depressed outcast, in a world of glaciers and divine providence, is drawn to the sacred moonlight. In the third work, he explores— as Rayfield puts it— the “contrast between violence in man and nature and the gentleness of birds, music and singers”.The fourth is the most revealing of all: Stalin imagines a prophet not honoured in his own country, a wandering poet poisoned by his own people. Now 17, Stalin already envisions a ‘paranoic’ world where “great prophets could only expect conspiracy and murder”. If any of Stalin’s poems “contained an avis au lecteur”, argues Rayfield, “it is this one”.Dedicated to Eristavi— if any of Stalin’s colleagues had dedicated a youthful poem to a prince, it would have been used against them in the terror— Stalin’s fifth poem was, with ‘Morning’, his most admired, and appeared in the Socialist weekly Kvali (The Plough). Entitled ‘Old Ninika’, its heroic sage requires both the harp to inspire and the sickle to kill. When, 10 years after these works were published, he was a top Bolshevik, a political god-father running a gang of hitmen and bank robbers to fund Lenin’s faction, he was still proud of his poetry. An unpublished memoir from the 1905 revolution recalls a pistol-toting Bolshevik boss leading packhorses bearing guns and stolen banknotes over the mountains, cheerfully declaiming his own poems to his companions.The ex-romantic poet despised and destroyed modernism, but promoted socialist realism, his distorted version of romanticism. He knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman. He mused about the Georgian poets of his childhood. During the terror, he released a famous Georgian intellectual from prison in order to translate Rustaveli’s “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin” into Russian. He then edited it himself and delicately translated some of the couplets, asking modestly: “Will they do?” His translations were surprisingly fine, but he refused to be given credit for them.Revolutionary politics Stalin never publicly acknowledged his own poems. Why did he stop writing them? One answer is that, gifted as he was at poetry, he was superbly qualified for revolutionary politics in every way: Marxism was to be his religion and his poetry. As importantly, he would be a Russian statesman as well as a world revolutionary, while his poetry belonged in a small imperial province, Georgia, a parochial backwater, in a minor language. As he later told a friend: “I lost interest in writing poetry because it requires one’s entire attention— a hell of a lot of patience. And in those days I was like quicksilver.”In 1949, for Stalin’s official 70th birthday, the Politburo magnate and notorious chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria— a fellow Georgian, secretly commissioned the best translators of poetry, including Pasternak and Andrei Tarkovsky, to create a Russian edition of the five poems. They were not told who the author was, but one of the poets thought “this work is worthy of the Stalin Prize first rank”— though probably he had guessed the identity of the young versifier. In the midst of the project, they received the stern order, clearly from Stalin himself, to stop work. Stalin wished to be remembered by history as the supreme leader of world Marxist revolution and the ruthless Red Tsar of the Russian imperium, not as a teenage poet from Georgia.