The Red Flag: A History Of Communism - Plot & Excerpts
Gorky described it as a place of ‘picturesque wildness’. In its courtyard is a spherical stone, from which Amiran – a Georgian Prometheus – is said to have thrown his sword before his cliff-chained incarceration as punishment for challenging the gods (or, in the Georgian legend, Jesus Christ). Each Maundy Thursday Gori’s blacksmiths would hammer their anvils to symbolize the renewal of his chains and thus prevent him wreaking revenge on his oppressors.6 Ioseb Djugashvili was born in 1878 in the shadow of this castle. He was the son of Beso, a poor artisanal cobbler, and his mother was the daughter of a serf. Georgia was a society awash with stories of Promethean rebellion and vengeance, unsurprisingly given its history. A mountainous borderland, sandwiched between empires, it had a long history of foreign invasion, culminating with the Russians, who had ruled for the previous eighty years. Periodically it had attempted liberation and therefore acquired a well-established warrior tradition, idealized, Walter Scott-style, by romantic nationalist writers.
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