Josef Stalin's old teacher, Orthodox Father Bogoyavlenski, regaled pious Stuttgart Germans with anecdotes of the days when Russia's future Dictator was a schoolboy at Tiflis' Theological Seminary. Everyone knows that Stalin's mother tried to make him a priest (TIME, Dec. 8, 1930), and every Russian knows that for 300 years at least Russian scoffers have baited Russian believers with the following rigmarole: "I believe that Jesus fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread, but I do not believe they weren't hungry afterward. I believe that water can be turned into wine but I do not believe any one can get drunk on it. . . ."
In Stuttgart's Schwabischer Merkur, old Father Bogoyavlenski tells how Schoolboy Stalin, when baited by a scoffer with Russia's old rigmarole, "beat the impious one so mercilessly that he had to be sent to the hospital."*
This he did, Schoolboy Stalin plausibly explained, in obedience to the injunction of an Orthodox Bishop who had said, "If you hear sacrilegious speech, close the mouth of the blasphemer with your hand." In mathematics, according to Father Bogoyavlenski, "Stalin always stood at the foot of the class. Asked to do a sum in addition, he said the answer was one thousand. 'Only one thousand?' the teacher inquired. 'Well then a million!'" retorted generous Schoolboy Stalin. Berlin rumors last week that famed Professor Hermann Zondek, specialist in internal diseases, had left for Moscow "ostensibly to lecture but actually to treat Herr Stalin" vexed the Dictator. Pulling on his heavy peasant boots he clumped off to the State Opera, sat in a front box wearing an old khaki blouse, appeared to enjoy Othello.
*Living AKC translation.