““STALIN He learned to write in the language of Georgia, his homeland, but in the seminary the monks made him speak Russian. Years later in Moscow, his south Caucasus accent still gave him away. So he decided to become more Russian than the Russians. Was not Napoleon, who hailed from Corsica, more French than the French? And was not Catherine the Great, who was German, more Russian than the Russians? The Georgian, Iosif Dzhugashvili, chose a Russian name. He called himself Stalin, which means “steel.” The man of steel expected his son to be made of steel too: from childhood, Stalin’s son Yakov was tempered in fire and ice and shaped by hammer blows. It did not work. He was his mother’s child. At the age of nineteen, Yakov wanted no more of it, could bear no more. He pulled the trigger. The gunshot did not kill him. He awoke in the hospital. At the foot of the bed, his father commented: “You can’t even get that right.””
