MORE than 50 years after the death of Joseph Stalin, his mother’s previously unknown memoirs have been found in a secret former Soviet archive in his home state, Georgia. They portray the childhood of a sensitive boy who would become one of the great monsters of the 20th century, writes Tom Walker.

The Soviet dictator was born in 1878 (not 1879 as he later claimed), the only child of a cobbler and a seamstress, Beso and Keke Djugashvili. In her memoirs, Keke reveals that, having lost two babies, she regarded “Soso” – the diminutive of Joseph – as a religious miracle.

She details the illnesses and accidents that left him partly crippled, and the shadow he lived under as the son of a brutal alcoholic. His father “could not stop drinking. A good family man was destroyed . . . his hands began shaking and he couldn’t sew shoes”.

“My Soso was a very sensitive child,” reports Keke. “As soon as he heard the sound of his father’s singing balaam-balaam from the street, he’d immediately run to me asking if he could go and wait at our neighbours’ until his father fell asleep.”

Keke’s memoirs were released from a locked archive by the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, at the request of Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book, Young Stalin, is serialised in News Review today.

Keke was famously beautiful as a young woman, and there is a hint of earthy mischief in the memoirs. She and her mother taught the boy to walk by exploiting his love of flowers: Keke would hold out a camomile and Soso ran to grasp it. Once, when her mother attracted him with a flower, Keke jovially pulled out her breasts and showed them to the toddler, who ignored the flower and dived for the breasts.

She says she hurriedly buttoned up after a drunken lodger, spying on her, burst out laughing.

Keke sheds little light on rumours, sometimes encouraged by Stalin, that he was actually fathered by another man – beyond saying, perhaps innocently, that one of the putative fathers, a wealthy merchant and local wrestling champion, “always tried to assist us in the creation of our family”.

She writes about her struggles to help her intelligent son win a scholarship to a seminary in the Georgian capital, Tiflis (now Tbilisi) to become a student priest. On the train to Tiflis, where his estranged father was working, the boy suddenly began to cry. “Mummy,” he sobbed, “what if, when we arrive in the city, Father finds me and forces me to become a shoe-maker? I want to study. I’d rather kill myself than become a cobbler.”

“I kissed him,” reminisces Keke, “and wiped away his tears.” She says she told him: “Nobody will stop you studying, nobody is going to take you away from me.”

Within a few years, however, he rebelled against the school authorities and declared himself a revolutionary seeking the downfall of the tsar. She took the train to Tiflis again to try to save him from expulsion.

For the first time “he got angry with me. He shouted that it wasn’t my business. I said, ‘My son, you’re my only child, don’t kill me . . . how will you be able to defeat Emperor Nicholas II? Leave that to those who have brothers and sisters’.”

Soso soothed and hugged her, telling her that he was not a rebel. “It was his first lie.”

When, years later, her son became Soviet dictator she refused to move to Moscow to join him in the Kremlin and remained until her death living in a small apartment in Georgia.

Stalin never knew she had written her memoirs. He would probably have been incensed by them. He was outraged when she was sometimes interviewed by sycophantic Soviet journalists. In the archives, Montefiore found this order to the Politburo: “I ask you to forbid the philistine riffraff that has penetrated our press, from publishing any more ‘interviews’ with my mother and all other crass publicity. Spare me from the sensationalism of these scoundrels!”

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