Stalin Was Just a Bookkeeper in the Revolution, and Then Became General Secretary
In 1917, while Lenin and Trotsky were on the streets calling for insurrection, Stalin was doing the organizing and fundraising nobody else wanted. He became General Secretary later not by speeches, but by sitting at the table.
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Even his birthday was one he changed himself
The parish register, the seminary certificate, the tsarist police file and his own handwritten 1920s questionnaire all say 18 December 1878. But the birthday he announced after taking power was 21 December 1879 — off by one year and three days. Bob Service offers one judgment in his biography: forgery was too easy for him. Service also has an unprovable but persuasive speculation — changing the birthday helped him dodge conscription when he was young. The thing itself is the theme of the whole episode: this man's attitude toward facts was instrumental.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelHow anomalous it was for a Georgian to rule Moscow
His real name was Joseph Jugashvili, and he was born in Georgia. Georgia is in the Caucasus, next to Armenia, just north of Iran and Turkey, far from Russia; it has its own language, its own alphabet, and its religion is Georgian Orthodoxy, which is not the same thing as Russian Orthodoxy. The analogy the episode gives is: a man from a Georgian Orthodox background climbing to the top of power in Moscow is like a mid-20th-century man from an Irish Catholic background, from some remote place like Limerick, becoming the master of London. For Georgians at the time, being governed by Moscow meant being colonized.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelHis father refused to change trades, then started hitting people
His father Bessarion (nicknamed Besso) was a cobbler with his own workshop in Gori, and by most accounts good at his craft. But he refused to keep up with the times: he kept making Georgian-style soft leather high boots while the market had already turned to European shoes. He did not adapt; he became bitter, drank, and the violence fell mainly on his wife Ekaterina (Kiki) and little Joseph, who was nicknamed "Mad Besso." Stalin later told his daughter Svetlana one scene: his father was drunk and beating his mother, he grabbed a knife and threw it at his father, missed, his father charged, and he ran to a neighbor's house and hid for several days until his father's rage passed.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelSmallpox, a carriage, and a left arm that was too short
Around age six he got smallpox, severe enough that his mother thought he would die — two older brothers had already died in infancy, and the family was too poor to afford a doctor, so they could only call a local folk healer. He survived, but his face was permanently scarred, and every official photograph was retouched. Later a runaway carriage hit him and broke his arm; the left arm never healed properly and was visibly shorter and stiffer for the rest of his life. The episode's phrasing is: smallpox did not take him, his father's violence did not take him, and the carriage did not take him either. His mother was extremely devoted to him and had ambitious plans for him.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelHe wrote poetry, and he was good at it
Two things happened at once in his late teens: he began writing quite good poetry, and he entered the seminary. The episode reads one poem: "The pink buds have already blossomed, toward the pale violet violets; brushed by the breeze, the lily of the valley bends down on the grass. Flowers, my Georgia. May peace come to my native land, and may you, friends, make our homeland famous through study." Anita says that in the original Georgian it is quite beautiful. It shows two things: he was a proud Georgian, not a Russian; and in the tsarist context, writing about a "homeland" like that was already close to sedition.
— Anita ArnonThe seminary was the tsar's Russification machine
In 1894 he won a place at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. The sign over the school said Georgian Orthodox, but in practice it was under the control of the Russian Orthodox Church, one of the institutions the tsar used to "Russify" the borderlands. Students were kept under close surveillance, with constant reports written: are these people good tsarist subjects, are they talking sedition. And right under that surveillance, he was reading banned books, including What Is to Be Done? and other big questions about freedom and the individual. Anita's comment in the episode is: the surveillance here was not done well enough.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelHe took a bandit's name for himself
On the banned list was a Georgian novel, Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide, whose protagonist is a mountain outlaw named Koba. He took that name as his own alias, and at the seminary his classmates called him that. The episode calls it a kind of "name determinism": he first took the name of a bandit hero, and then he really became a bandit. The turning point from seminary student to bandit began when he saw with his own eyes two mountain bandits publicly hanged in the center of Gori for shooting a policeman over a stray cow — he was forbidden to watch, but he went.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelThey robbed 250,000 rubles and could not spend a single one
In 1907 he and a group of friends ambushed a bank carriage in Yerevan Square in Tiflis, almost within sight of the seminary: some stood up high and threw bombs down, others fired in the street, and the man organizing, financing and directing it all behind the scenes was Stalin, under the alias Koba. They got away with 250,000 rubles packed in linen bags. But the bank had already published the serial numbers of its largest-denomination notes, so not one ruble of that money could be spent. It gave him his first police photograph, but he did not go to prison for it and essentially walked away untouched.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelThe Bolsheviks were the majority, the Mensheviks the intellectuals
Lenin came from a middle-class Russian family; in 1887 his brother was hanged for trying to assassinate the tsar, and that radicalized the younger brother completely; he was expelled from university for attending too many protests and was exiled to Siberia in the 1890s. By then he was already the leader of the radical Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The party was an umbrella organization trying to hold many currents together, a judgment that later proved badly wrong. The Bolsheviks were the majority faction within the party, the Mensheviks were more intellectuals and the educated strata; what the Bolsheviks wanted was "do it now, do it fast, whatever the cost."
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelIn 1917 he was not at the front, he was keeping the books
Stalin caught Lenin's attention by writing on the national question, and in 1912 he was brought onto the Bolshevik Central Committee. What Lenin noticed was this: the man was highly organized, could handle the somewhat boring organizational work, made sure the money arrived — the classic behind-the-scenes job. In 1917, when Lenin and Trotsky were outside calling for insurrection, he was not there — he was not a good orator, not a man who stood at the front. The episode says this would sting him later: Trotsky would repeatedly point out that while everyone was bleeding for the glorious revolution, this man was keeping the accounts.
— Anita Arnon / William de RumpelIn their own words · checked verbatim
falsification came easily to him
William de Rumpel5:28
for a Georgian to rise to power in Moscow and someone from a Georgian Orthodox background is as improbable as in mid 20th century Britain, someone with an Irish Catholic background from Limerick or, you know, choose your choose your remote part of Ireland coming to power in London
William de Rumpel6:35
this is a kid that doesn't die. You know, the pox doesn't take him. This father's brutality doesn't take him. This horse and carriage doesn't take him.
William de Rumpel12:53
this is one of those weird things where you get nominative determinism, right? So, he takes on the name Koba, the name of this bandit hero of a book.
William de Rumpel21:11
They make off with a significant sum. It's a quarter of a million rubles that they carry off in linen bags. But they cannot spend a single ruble of it because the bank had circulated the serial numbers of the largest notes.
Anita Arnon25:18
He's not really there. He's not a good orator. He is not the man who's on the front line.
Anita Arnon30:38
And Stalin is doing, let's face it, the unglamorous work that nobody else wants to do. But it's still important. So he still has a seat at the table.
William de Rumpel31:41
Figures
| Difference between Stalin's official birthday and his registered birthday | 21 December 1879 vs 18 December 1878, a difference of one year and three days | 5:28 |
| Stalin's birth name | Joseph Jugashvili | 6:35 |
| Year Stalin entered the Tiflis Theological Seminary | 1894 | 18:09 |
| Year of Stalin's first marriage | 1906, to his wife Ekaterina (Kato) | 23:16 |
| Year of birth of Stalin's son Yakov | 1907 | 23:16 |
| Amount taken in the Yerevan Square bank robbery | 250,000 rubles | 25:18 |
| Year Lenin's brother was hanged | 1887 | 26:18 |
| Year Stalin entered the Bolshevik Central Committee | 1912 | 29:32 |
Glossary
- Koba
- Stalin's alias from his seminary years, taken from the mountain-bandit protagonist of the novel The Patricide.
- Bolsheviks / Mensheviks
- The two wings of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; the former were the majority and more radical, the latter mostly intellectuals.
- Russification
- The blanket term for the tsar's policy of remaking the borderlands in Russian culture, language and religion.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in Soviet history and how power accumulates; anyone who wants to know how someone who never stood at the front gets to the top.
The opening section about the Stalin reliefs in the Moscow metro and Putin, and the ad break in the middle.