Ioseb Iremashvili

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Ioseb Iremashvili (1878–1944) was a Georgian politician and writer. He was a boyhood friend of Joseph Stalin, but later became his political rival. He is best known for Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens (Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia), published in Berlin in 1932, the first memoir of Stalin’s childhood.

Iremashvili grew up in Gori, Georgia, attended a local church school, and studied at Tiflis Theological Seminary. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and became part of the Menshevik faction.

After 1917 he worked as a teacher in Tiflis and was elected to the Constituent Assembly of Georgia in 1919. When the Red Army invaded Georgia in February 1921, Iremashvili was jailed in Metekhi but was released after his sister pleaded with Stalin during a visit to Tiflis in July 1921. In October 1921, 62 arrested Mensheviks, including Iremashvili, were deported to Germany, where he was granted political asylum.

In Berlin, he worked with Georgian émigrés to win support for Georgian independence. In 1932 he published his memoirs in German. The book, written in exile and outside Soviet censorship, is an important independent account of Stalin’s youth and early years, used by historians. Iremashvili describes Stalin’s life in Gori and his harsh treatment by his father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, and argues that beatings helped shape Stalin’s character. He says Stalin left the seminary on his own, not because of revolutionary activity, and that Stalin’s parents were Ossetians, a detail some relate to Stalin’s tough policies in Georgia in the 1920s.