Memoirs
In 1932, he published, in German, his memoirs, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens ("Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia"). Published in emigration and immune to Soviet censure, the book, although hostile to Stalin, is considered the only independent contemporary account of Stalin's youth and his early years in Georgia, and has proven a vital source for Stalin biographers. In his memoirs, Iremashvili relates many details of the Gori life of Soso (Stalin's childhood name), with particular emphasis of his brutal treatment at the hands of his father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili. The primary deduction made by Iremashvili based upon his account was followed by several psychobiographers, most notably by Gustav Bychowski and Daniel Rancour-Lafferiere, which consider beatings the key psychological determination of the future dictator. Iremashvili also reports that the young Stalin voluntarily terminated his studies at the Seminary, and was not expelled for his revolutionary activity as stated in the Soviet leader’s official biography. In addition, he claims that Soso’s parents were ethnic Ossetians, thus explaining Stalin’s particularly hard-line policy towards independent Georgia and his excessive harshness in suppressing anti-Soviet opposition in the Georgian SSR in the 1920s.
Read more about this topic: Ioseb Iremashvili
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