Self-consciousness about his pronunciation affected the way in which he dropped his voice in conversation. His heavily accented Russian betrayed him as a man of the borderlands. Stalin could not escape his ethnic origins. But this trivia also reminded the party and the public that up to the age of twenty-eight Stalin had written and published exclusively in Georgian. To be sure, they established Stalin’s early revolutionary credentials. In 1946, the first volumes of Stalin’s Collected Works began to appear, consisting mainly of handouts and brief programmatic statements that hardly seem worth mentioning, let alone immortalizing. Two years later, the leading journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Molodaia Gvardiia, published an eighty-page compilation of sources entitled “Childhood and Youth of the Leader: Documents, Memoirs, Stories,” which dealt exclusively with Stalin’s Georgian roots. At the height of the election campaign to the Supreme Soviet under the new Soviet constitution, a large exhibition of Georgian paintings opened at the Tretiakov Gallery, featuring as one of its main themes the history of the Bolshevik organization, with paintings of high points in Stalin’s Transcaucasian career. On three occasions-in 1937, when a large exhibition of Georgian art in Moscow portrayed Stalin’s early career in Transcaucasia-in 1939, when the documents on his early life appeared-and in 1946, when the early volumes of his collected works containing the Georgian writings were published-the propaganda apparatus widely publicized Stalin’s Georgian identity at the very time it was beating the drums of Great Russian nationalism. The information about himself that he allowed to be made public in his own lifetime contains an unresolved paradox.
But there is more to the mystery of Stalin than the absence of reliable documentary evidence on his early life. Up to the moment when Stalin emerged as a leading figure in the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government in 1917, the details of his personal and political life remain skimpy and much disputed. In his memoirs, the Georgian Menshevik émigré Grigorii Uratadze described Joseph Stalin, whom he had known in the days of their revolutionary activity in the Caucasus, as “a man without a biography.” The assertion was not without foundation, and little has changed in the intervening years to alter Uratadze’s judgment. Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of the King’s Jest.”
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