Email
On 17 May 1872, a handsome young cobbler, the very model of a chivalrous Georgian man, Vissarion 'Beso' Djugashvili, aged twenty-two, married Ekaterina 'Keke' Geladze, seventeen, an attractive freckled girl with auburn hair, at the Uspensky Church in the small Georgian town of Gori.
A matchmaker had visited Keke's house to tell her about the suit of Beso the cobbler: he was a respected artisan in Baramov's small workshop, quite a catch. 'Beso', says Keke in newly discovered memoirs, 'was considered a very popular young man among my friends and they were all dreaming of marrying him. My friends nearly burst with jealousy. Beso was an enviable groom, a true karachogheli [Georgian knight], with beautiful moustaches, very well dressed - and with the special sophistication of a town-dweller.' Nor was Keke in any doubt that she herself was something of a catch too: 'Among my female friends, I became the desired and beautiful girl.' Indeed, 'slender, chestnut-haired with big eyes', she was said to be 'very pretty'.
The wedding, according to tradition, took place just after sunset; Georgian social life, writes one historian, was 'as ritualised as English Victorian behaviour'. The marriage was celebrated with the rambunctious festivity of the wild town of Gori. 'It was', Keke remembers, 'hugely glamorous.' The male guests were true karachogheli, 'cheerful, daring and generous', wearing their splendid black chokhas, 'broad-shouldered with slim waists.' The chief of Beso's two best men was Yakov 'Koba' Egnatashvili, a strapping wrestler, wealthy merchant and local hero who, as Keke puts it, 'always tried to assist us in the creation of our family'.
The groom and his friends gathered for toasts at his home, before parading through the streets to collect Keke and her family. The garlanded couple then rode to church together in a colourfully decorated wedding phaeton, bells tingling, ribbons fluttering. In the church, the choir gathered in the gallery; below them, men and women stood separately among the flickering candles. The singers burst into their elevating and harmonic Georgian melodies accompanied by a zurna, a Georgian wind instrument like a Berber pipe.
The bride entered with her bridesmaids, who were careful not to tread on the train, a special augur of bad luck. Father Khakhanov, an Armenian, conducted the ceremony, Father Kasradze recorded the marriage, and Father Christopher Charkviani, a family friend, sang so finely that Yakov Egnatashvili 'generously tipped him 10 roubles', no mean sum. Afterwards, Beso's friends headed the traditional singing and dancing procession through the streets, playing duduki, long pipes, to the supra, a Georgian feast presided over by a tamada, a joke-telling and wisdom-imparting toastmaster.
The service and singing had been in the unique Georgian language - not Russian because Georgia was only a recent addition to the Romanov Empire. For a thousand years, ruled by scions of the Bagratoni dynasty, the Kingdom of Sakartvelo (Georgia to Westerners, Gruzia to Russians) was an independent Christian bulwark of knightly valour against the Islamic Mongol, Timurid, Ottoman and Persian Empires. Its apogee was the twelfth-century empire of Queen Tamara, made timeless by the national epic, The Knight in the Panther Skin by Rustaveli. Over the centuries, the kingdom splintered into bickering principalities. In 1801 and 1810, the Tsars Paul and Alexander I annexed principalities to their empire. The Russians had only finished the military conquest of the Caucasus with the surrender of Imam Shamyl and his Chechen warriors in 1859 after a thirty-year war - and Adjaria, the last slice of Georgia, was gained in 1878. Even the most aristocratic Georgians, who served at the courts of the Emperor in St Petersburg or of the Viceroy in Tiflis, dreamed of independence. Hence Keke's pride in following Georgian traditions of manhood and marriage.
Beso, mused Keke, 'appeared to be a good family man ... He believed in God and always went to church.' The parents of both bride and groom had been serfs of local princes, freed in the 1860s by the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II. Beso's grandfather, Zaza, was an Ossetian from the village of Geri, north of Gori. Zaza, like Stalin, his great-grandson, became a Georgian rebel: in 1804, he joined the uprising of Prince Elizbar Eristavi against Russia. Afterwards, he was settled with other 'baptized Ossetians' in the village of Didi-Lilo, 9 miles from Tiflis, as a serf of Prince Badur Machabeli. Zaza's son Vano tended the Prince's vineyards and had two sons, Giorgi, who was murdered by bandits, and Beso, who got a job in Tiflis in the shoe factory of G. G. Adelkhanov but was headhunted by the Armenian Josef Baramov to make boots for the Russian garrison in Gori. There young Beso noticed the 'fascinating, neatly dressed girl with chestnut hair and beautiful eyes.'
Keke was also new to Gori, a daughter of Glakho Geladze, a peasant serf of the local granee, Prince Amilakhvari. Her father worked as a potter near by before becoming the gardener for a wealthy Armenian, Zakhar Gambarov, who owned fine gardens at Gambareuli on Gori's outskirts. As her father died young, Keke was raised by her mother's family. She remembered the excitement of moving to unruly Gor: 'What a happy journey it was! Gori was festively decorated, crowds of people swelled like the sea. A military parade dazzled our eyes. Music blared. Sazandari [a band of four percussion and wind instruments], and sweet duduki played, and everyone sang.'
Her young husband was a thin dark figure with black eyebrows and moustaches, always sporting a black Circassian coat, tightly belted, a peaked cap and baggy trousers tucked into high boots. 'Unusual, peculiar and morose', but also 'clever and proud', Beso was able to speak four languages (Georgian, Russian, Turkish and Armenian) and quote The Knight in the Panther Skin.
The Djugashvilis prospered. Many houses in Gori were so poor they were made of mud and dug out of the earth. But for the wife of the busy cobbler Beso there was no fear of such poverty. 'Our family happiness', declared Keke, 'was limitless.'
· Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
;