Mother of the Tsar

Even during her lifetime, Stalin’s mother, Yekaterina Dzhugashvili, was little known in the Soviet Union. Hidden away in a small Georgian town, she cleaned houses and washed other people’s laundry, largely ignored by her famous son in Moscow. But now “secret files” containing Stalin’s correspondence with his mother have been opened, providing us a glimpse into her life. For the 45th anniversary of Stalin’s death, Russian Life asked historian Roy Medvedev to tell the story of this self-effacing woman.

The life story of Yekaterina Georgievna Dzhugashvili – better known as Stalin’s mother – is often difficult to decipher. Rumors and stories about her abound, but they are often contradictory, especially when they involve her notorious son. But for such a mysterious figure, Yekaterina Dzhugashvili was surprisingly down-to-earth. A simple woman from the small Georgian town of Gori, she worked as a washer-woman, seamstress and housekeeper for her rich neighbors before being moved to a palace at the insistence of party leaders. She did not speak Russian and could neither read nor write in Georgian.

The historian Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko wrote that Stalin spoke of his mother rudely and cynically and ordered her to be closely monitored, a task he entrusted to two highly trusted female Communists. This is clearly false, as were other accounts of Stalin’s love and attention for his mother. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote that “he was a bad, inattentive son, as he was a father and husband ... His whole being was dedicated to politics, struggle – therefore, strangers were always more important and significant than his near and dear.”

The young Stalin attended a church school in Gori, then went on to theological seminary in Georgia’s capital Tiflis (later Tbilisi). In 1899, for reasons unclear, he was expelled from the seminary. By that time, Stalin was already reading Marx and Lenin and becoming interested in revolutionary activities. In the spring of 1904, after escaping from what would be the first of many exiles, in Siberia, Stalin spent several weeks with his mother in Gori. This would be their last extended meeting. The Revolution was drawing near, and Stalin, already a noticeable figure among the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks, could not rest. He worked in Tiflis, Baku and Batumi, traveled to St. Petersburg and Finland and handled weapons shipments. In 1905, Stalin married. One story has it that his mother found the bride, but this is not so. Stalin met Yekaterina Svanidze through her brother, Alyosha, a close friend at the Tiflis seminary. (Much later, in August of 1941, secret police chief Lavrenty Beria would personally bring Stalin the news of Alyosha Svanidze’s execution.)

In 1907, Stalin, with his wife and young son Yakov, moved to Baku, where Yekaterina died of pneumonia. After his wife’s death, Stalin traveled to Georgia on party business, but did not visit his mother. After another two arrests and exiles, Stalin left the Caucasus knowing nothing of his mother’s fate. And, being a simple woman removed from politics, she also knew nothing of her “Soso” – as she called Stalin – for over ten years.

In May 1921, Stalin went to the town of Nalchik in the Northern Caucasus for treatment and rest. At the end of June, he traveled on to Tiflis, where the Bolsheviks had come to power several months before. As the People’s Commissar for National Minorities and a Politburo member, Stalin participated in the plenary session of the Central Committee of Georgia’s Communist Party, meeting with the republic’s party leaders. He saw the Svanidze family and his son Yakov, whom he took back to Moscow (where, by this time, Stalin already had a new family). Again, he did not see his mother, but he did ask the new leaders of Georgia to take care of her.

In his biography of Stalin, Dmitry Volkogonov wrote that Yekaterina Dzhugashvili visited her son in Moscow in 1922, but this is not supported by any documents. We do know, however, that Stalin’s second wife Nadezhda spent several weeks in Georgia with their young son Vasily in April of 1922. She met Stalin’s mother and brought her the first letter from her son:

“April 16, 1922. Mom! Hello! Be healthy, don’t let grief into your heart. After all, they say: ‘While alive, I will make my violets happy, I will die and the worms of the grave will rejoice.’ This woman is my wife. Try not to offend her. Your Soso.”

Stalin’s next letter, dated January 1, 1923, was even shorter:

“Mom! Hello! Live 10,000 years. Love, Your Soso.”

Although Stalin’s mother would later receive news of her son from Nadezhda and others, Stalin never invited her to join him during his vacations in Georgia. Nor did he visit Gori, where, even during his lifetime, a museum was set up in the small home of the Dzhugashvili family. This museum has been closed several times, but today it has been refurbished and opened once again. And it does not suffer from a lack of visitors. Many photographs and portraits of the young Stalin and his mother are on display. Several years ago, a portrait of Stalin’s father – Vissarion Dzhugashvili – was added, which several of Stalin’s biographers consider to be a fake. A bootmaker by profession, Vissarion was an even more mysterious figure than Stalin’s mother. He died under unclear circumstances at the end of the 19th century, and Stalin never mentioned his name.

Naturally, as Stalin’s power continued to grow, the Georgian leaders could not help but show an interest in his mother. They insisted that Yekaterina Dzhugashvili move to Tiflis, where a wing of a small palace in the center of town was placed at her disposal. So Stalin’s mother moved to the Georgian capital with her few possessions, taking up only one room in the palace. When one of the Georgian leaders went to Moscow, Yekaterina Georgievna would dictate a letter to her son. She also sent him packages full of sweets and jams from the Caucasus.

In response, Stalin sent his mother a little money and short notes, which she carefully saved. Over the course of 16 years (1922-1937), there were 18 such notes. Later, they were stored as “secret” documents. As instructed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, historian Shota Chivadze translated Stalin’s letters into Russian, but kept the rough drafts of the translations for himself. Not long before Chivadze’s death, he passed these drafts on to his coworker Professor Leonid Spirin and they became public knowledge for the first time. Today, Stalin’s letters to his mother are stored in the Presidential Archives in Stalin’s former Kremlin apartment.

It was not only political business that prevented Stalin from writing home. Although he spoke and read Georgian well, he had no need to write in that language. One of Stalin’s friends, Artyom Sergeyev, recalled how Stalin labored over a letter to his mother for two hours. He had to remember how to write each word.

Stalin wrote his longest letter to his mother in March 1934, a year and a half after Nadezhda committed suicide:

“Hello Mom! I got your letter. I also got the jam, churchkheli [Georgian sweets – Ed.] and figs. The children were very happy and send you their thanks and greetings. I’m glad that you feel well and cheerful. I am healthy, don’t worry about me. I will survive my lot. I don’t know whether or not you need money. In any case, I am sending you R500. I’m also sending photos – of me and the children. Stay healthy, Mom. Don’t lose the cheerfulness of your soul! Love, Your Son Soso. 24/III, 1934. – The children send you their best. After Nadya’s death, of course, my personal life has been difficult. But, that’s OK, a brave man must always stay brave.”

Very few members of the party leadership knew of Nadezhda’s suicide. The official report and a multitude of obituaries spoke of her “demise” or her “untimely death.”  They wrote the words “sick condition,”  “death snatched her away” or “death mowed her down.” No medical conclusion on the cause of death was published. The head doctor of the Kremlin hospital, along with two other doctors, performed a detailed examination of Nadezhda’s body, and they were asked to sign a bulletin stating that Nadezhda died of appendicitis. All three refused. Plenty of rumors circulated, but they did not reach the ears of Stalin’s mother, who was given the semi-official version of acute appendicitis.

Stalin’s mother was well taken care of. She was treated by the best doctors, and her modest needs were satisfied at the government’s expense. This old woman who had spent a large part of her life serving others now got her own housekeeper. But Stalin’s mother did not abuse her new position. She kept almost all her old habits and refused many of the privileges offered her. She was issued a permanent pass to the Georgian Opera Theater, but she preferred going to church.

Stalin was not Yekaterina’s only child. She was 16 when she gave birth to her first son Mikhail, but he died a year later. Her second son, Georgi, also died young. Stalin was the third. It was only in 1990 that historians were finally able to examine a range of church and other records from the Tiflis region. They were surprised to find that Stalin was born not on December 21, 1879, as was written in all his biographies, but a year earlier – on December 6, 1878 – according to the registry of Gori’s Church of the Assumption.

Stalin’s mother probably did not remember the exact date and year of his birth. But she remembered all her sons well. When the Georgian leaders arrived at the end of each year to congratulate her on the birthday of “the Great Stalin,” the independent-minded and sharp-tongued Yekaterina Dzhugashvili often declared that her first-born Mikhail had been more capable, smarter and more handsome than the other two.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Yekaterina’s health began to fail. She was often ill and hardly left her room. In June of 1935, Stalin decided to send his children to Tiflis to visit their grandmother. In a letter to his mother dated June 11, he wrote:

“I am sending my children to you. Greet them and kiss them. They’re good kids. If I am able, I will also somehow come to see you.”

Much later, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana would reminisce: “I remember how Yasha, Vasily and I were sent to Tbilisi to visit our grandmother; she was sick then ... We spent nearly a week in Tbilisi and were at Grandma’s for half an hour. She lived in some sort of old, beautiful palace with a park; she had a dark, low room with small windows facing the courtyard. In the corner was an iron bed and a screen, and the room was full of old women – all in black as was the custom in Georgia. On the bed sat an old woman. We were led to her, she embraced all of us passionately with her thin, narrowish hands, kissed us and said something in Georgian. Only Yasha understood. He answered her, and we stood silently ... All the old women – Grandma’s friends – sitting in the room kissed us in turn, and they all said I looked a lot like Grandma. She offered us sugar candies, and tears ran down her face ... We soon left and didn’t go to “the palace” again, and I was all surprised and wondered why Grandma lived so poorly. That was the first time in my life I had seen such a scary black iron bed.”

Yekaterina’s health continued to decline, and in the fall, Stalin decided to visit his mother himself. On October 18, the newspaper Zarya Vostoka (Ray of the East) printed the following announcement in large letters: “Comrade Stalin in Tiflis. On the morning of October 17, Comrade Stalin arrived in Tiflis to visit his mother. Having spent the entire day with his mother, Comrade Stalin left for Moscow during the night of October 17.”

The details of the meeting went unreported. Only three days later did TASS employees make a visit to Yekaterina’s room. Their report, full of the usual stereotypes of the day, was published on October 22 in Zarya Vostoka under the headline “Conversation with Comrade Stalin’s Mother.” Here are several excerpts from this “conversation.”

“My meeting with Soso ... I have not seen him for quite a while...I don’t feel well, I feel weak, but when I met him, I literally grew wings. My weakness and illness immediately passed ... The time flew by unnoticed. We recalled the old years, friends, dear ones. He joked a lot, we laughed. We sat together for a long time, and I was very happy, for my Soso was with me.”

“We listened carefully and intensely,” concluded the journalists, “to the slow speech of this thin old woman, who gave the world the greatest of men.”

A similar report was published on October 23 in Pravda, and after several days, many newspapers began to run front-page stories on the new theme of children and parents. They wrote that, during the years of civil war, collectivization and industrialization, many Bolsheviks lost contact with their relatives and often did not know where their parents lived, or in what conditions. It was the duty of such Bolsheviks to show attention and care for their parents and elderly relatives.

According to Spirin, Yekaterina was warned of her son’s visit only an hour before he arrived. Stalin decided to return to Moscow through Tiflis after a vacation in the town of Gagrakh. He was accompanied by security. Yekaterina knew that her son was a big “boss,” but had only a vague idea of his real position. She asked: “Joseph, who will you be now?”

“Secretary of the Central Committee,” Stalin replied.

But his mother did not really understand what the “Secretary of the Central Committee” was. So Stalin asked: “Mother, do you remember our tsar?”

“Of course, I remember.”

“Well, then, I’m like the tsar.”

Perhaps this information failed to sink in. Perhaps it simply failed to impress her. In any case, Yekaterina  said to Stalin in parting: “But it’s too bad you didn’t become a priest.”

Yekaterina’s health did not improve. At the end of May 1937, she fell ill with pneumonia, and, in spite of all the doctors could do, she died on the evening of June 4. Back in Moscow, Stalin was quickly informed.

According to Eduard Radzinsky, Stalin did not go to Tbilisi because he feared revenge from those who had already suffered from persecution. “He knew that they are very vindictive in the Caucasus. And he did not dare travel to Georgia to take her to the grave. This, too, he would not forget: that his enemies had not allowed him to say good-bye to his mother.” In fact, this is not so. Stalin went to Georgia many times after 1937, but at the time of his mother’s death, Stalin had other things on his mind.

At the end of May, the repression intensified in Russia. In Moscow alone, hundreds were arrested every day – the highest military leaders, members of the Central Committee, economic leaders, people’s commissars, scholars and writers. Such famous military commanders as Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich and Feldman were arrested. From June 1-4, the Higher Military Council was created in Moscow, at which hundreds of military leaders discussed the activities of “traitors” and “spies” in the ranks of the Red Army. Voroshilov and Stalin spoke. After several days, the Military Collegium ordered all the military leaders who had already been arrested, including Tukhachevsky, to be shot.

Preparations were under way for the June plenary session of the Central Committee, at which the NKVD (or secret police) was granted emergency powers and answered to Stalin alone. A totalitarian dictatorship was being introduced. On some days, up to a thousand people were shot in Moscow alone, and the government was paralyzed with fear. During this time, Stalin was simply not thinking about his mother. In order to avoid harmful gossip, he ordered the news of her death to be kept out of the newspapers. Therefore, there were no condolences or obituaries.

But Georgia could not help but notice the death of Stalin’s mother, if only because the funeral ritual has a special place in Georgian tradition. On June 5, all the Georgian newspapers printed a photograph of Yekaterina Dzhugashvili along with the following statement: “The Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the Georgian Republic notify the laborers of Georgia that on June 4 at 11:05 p.m., the mother of Comrade Stalin, Yekaterina Georgievna Dzhugashvili, died at home in her apartment after a serious illness (pneumonia) ...”

Although, throughout her life, Stalin’s mother was a deeply religious woman, it was decided to bury her according to the secular ceremony established for leading party and state figures. The next day, Georgian newspapers announced that Yekaterina’s body had been moved from her apartment in the palace to the House of the Red Army and Fleet. Three days were set aside for those wishing to pay their last respects.

Among the dozens of wreaths on her coffin, two stood out for their large size. The first said: “To a dear and beloved mother, from your son Iosif Dzhugashvili (from Stalin),” and the second: “To dear and unforgettable Yekaterina Gavrilovna Dzhugashvili, from Nina and Lavrenty Beria.” For three days, hundreds of thousands of people from all around Georgia filed past the coffin of Stalin’s mother, along with delegations from neighboring republics.

On June 8, a short civil service was held. At 5:15 in the afternoon, Beria, Mgaloblishvili, Makharadze, Bakradze, Musabekov and Goglidze lifted the coffin and carried it from the House of the Red Army. As Zarya Vostoka reported, “The funeral procession slowly moved through the streets in the direction of the Davidov mountain. A large crowd of Tbilisi workers followed the coffin. Through the high mountain streets of the town, to the sound of the funeral march, the procession approached the building of the Mtatsmindsky Museum of Writers, not far from which a fresh grave had been dug ...” Representatives of the Georgian government gave short speeches, along with the leaders of Azerbaidzhan and Armenia. At 6:50, the coffin was lowered into the grave. And so, not far from the graves of the poets Griboyedov and Chavchavadze, Stalin’s mother found her final resting place. She had dreamed of her son becoming a priest – not a new kind of god or tsar with the power to kill or spare millions. She believed in God throughout her life, but her coffin was lowered into the grave to the tune of the Internationale.