Young Stalin [Paperback]

Montefiore paints a very vivid picture of Stalin's youth, providing a comprehensive narrative from his birth in Georgia to his rise to power as a member of the inner circle of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. He shows a youthful Stalin who was variously a seminary student, a star choirboy, a proud Georgian poet and a rabble-rousing Marxist fanatic. He shows his development as an undercover party leader, including his role as an organizer of bank robberies and extortions, and emphasizes his early ruthlessness in organizing the executions of "traitors". He explores the different facets of Stalin's life as a Siberian exile, an escapee, a charming philanderer, and an absentee father. And finally he shows the rising Bolshevik leader: a founder of Pravda, one of Lenin's most trusted lieutenants, ruthless and pragmatic, who could be relied on to do the dirty work, and who was already one of the innermost circle when the Bolsheviks seized power.

Montefiore uses a variety of materials, but especially unpublished memoirs from Stalin's early friends and colleagues newly available in the Georgian communist party archives. Material from these was sometimes used in the official Stalinist biographies, but anything that deviated from the official dull accounts was quietly buried. Montefiore explains that both Stalin and Trotsky were eager to obscure Stalin's early life: Trotsky wished to belittle him as a mere party bureaucrat, while Stalin feared that his unruly past would be an obstacle as he moved towards supreme power. Montefiore acknowledges the difficulties in assessing the accuracy of the various memoirs, but observes that there are enough different accounts (and also independent accounts from refugees in the West) that even if we can't be sure of all the details, the overall picture seems sound.

In Montefiore's portrayal, one striking aspect of Stalin's youth is that he was genuinely immersed in a world of treachery and betrayal. A wanted man, always on the run, several times betrayed and captured due to Tsarist double agents deep in the Bolshevik leadership, he was right to be distrustful and paranoid. At this time in Stalin's life there really were traitors everywhere.

Overall, this is a fascinating account of a wild young revolutionary daredevil. But probably its greatest value is in providing insights towards the underlying strengths and weaknesses of the later General Secretary Stalin. We see his considerable personal charm and his vast capacity for organization. But we also see his cynicism, his mistrustfulness, and his willingness to use force and terror as everyday tactics.

This book gave me back my faith in the art of biography, that something new can be found about even the most heavily referenced figures. Although I've read many Stalin biographies, in most of them the Vozhd's early years failed to come into focus. We learned little about the family other than papa Beso's drunken brutality and about mama Keke's resourcefulness and pride.

Yet, even in this most studied of lives, there is plenty of gold to be found by those who know where to look. Montefiore takes us back to the almost Mediterranean splendor of the Caucasus, a land of fierce feuds and vendette, of revolutionary nobles and passionate women, where everything (the weather, the clothing, the food, the tempers) is as un-Russian as can be. Stalin was definitely a Caucasian. He was proud and violent, but also very sharp and able to behave with unexpected generosity. He was extremely bright and amazingly well read. It is easy to see why Stalin was offended by the poet Mandelstam's celebrated line in his "Ode to Stalin", about "His fat fingers" "slimy like slugs". Stalin surely regarded himself as an intellectual and this description as a dim-witted vulgarian could only wound him deeply. In his pictures as a young man he is curiously good looking, and one can imagine the attraction this bright young rebel might have had for all sorts of women. In this Stalin was very unlike Hitler, for whom fleshly pleasures were repellent, and rather like Mussolini who was to the end a ladies' man.

Stalin's friends come alive in this book. Sure, they felt no compunction about cutting an enemy's throat, or blowing up an oil refinery, or bombing a police station, but they were also able to have fun, to drink, to joke, perhaps like many rebels of our day. It is to me a mistery how such a fanatic as Stalin, whose faith in revolutionary communism was boundless, could also enjoy all sorts of social and physical pleasures. Perhaps the explanation might be in his mother's example. Keke Geladze, as religious a woman as ever lived, was not above drinking or taking up lovers.

Stalin's environment also becomes completely understandable. Georgia was also much like the American far West, a violent borderland where strong men imposed their will on others and insults where washed away in blood. Many Georgian notables supported the rebels not because they sympathised with socialism but because they saw them as nationalists fighting against the Russian invaders. It is a tragedy that Stalin ordered the murder of so many of his former backers, and that he came, in time, to be even more Russian than the Tsar ever was. Far from being a social outsider, in Georgia Stalin was known to everyone in his hometown, and he was very close to the local nobility, magnates, clergy, intellectuals and criminals. Stalin was uniquely Georgian, which might explain to some extent his current popularity there.

These are just a few of the surprises this book has in store. It includes several surprisingly good poems by Stalin as a young man. It is a pity that in later years he would dedicate himself to writing leaden treatises on subjects such as linguistics, when in fact he was a light, luminous poet. It has some wonderful pictures of a few of the Vozhd's girlfriends, and they are also surprisingly good looking. But its greatest triumph is that it shows how Josif-Soso-Koba-Ivanovitch became Stalin. You take a boy of many gifts (bright, curious, brave, strong) and with a few but very great defects (proud, spiteful, fanatical) and subject him to violence and brutality during his early years, then allow him to develop his intellect while leaving his morality stunted, place him in an environment where he might become a negative leader without being punished for it, add in social ferment and revolution in the air, and then a mighty conflagration. The boy is father to the man. Stalin was not a wolf or a beast in human shape, as many said, he was just that same boy Soso, but now inmeasurably powerful, and with history on his side. The son of a cobbler and a washing woman ended up as one of the two most powerful men in the world.

Stalin's enemies dismissed him as "the man who missed the Revolution", "a grey blur", a nonentity who sidelined Lenin's true heirs through bureaucratic wiles. But although he was a terrorist and a sociopath since youth, Stalin was no "grey blur": he was one of the most fascinating personalities yet encountered, a colourful bundle of contradictions, intellectual and man of action, womanizer and ascetic, political fanatic and cynical pragmatist. Far from having usurped a role reserved to other revolutionaries such as Trotski or Bukharin, Stalin was Lenin's true heir, which is not meant to be a praise. Lenin admired Stalin precisely because of his ruthlesness and obduracy rather than in spite of them. One doesn't need to be sympathetic to Stalin or to Communism to enjoy this, a brilliant book, with enormous cinematic potential. It begs to be made into a movie.

I came away from "Young Stalin" very impressed. The author has done a superb job of constructing Josef Stalin's life story from his birth to his initial rise at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. I can't remember being as impressed with a book's research as I was with this book. There is a wealth of information on Stalin's early life -- a period that has never been written about in such great detail -- tapped from hundreds of new sources and revealed in fascinating text. Even if you're not terribly interested in Stalin's life -- I wasn't -- you will find this book interesting, as Stalin's early life was one adventure after another.

The book begins by discussing Stalin's birth to a tough-minding, loving mother and an alcoholic father in a town in Georgia as dirt-poor as anything imaginable. From there, Stalin excelled in school, and nearly became a priest, but was ironically driven away by excessively strict priests at his school, running right into the arms of the revolutionary beliefs that were taking the world by storm at the end of the 19th Century. It was at this point that Stalin's life really began to take shape. From there, Stalin became a shadowy figure in the underground, specializing in everything from arch-conspirator, to bank robber extraordinaire, to extortionist, to intelligence specialist, to counter-intelligence expert, to even murderer. Using his dark intelligence, over time Stalin became the key problem-solver for Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, helping rid the party of spies -- both real and imagined -- and planning and executing the bank robberies which would fund Lenin and his fledging Bolshevik Party in its early days.

Between the events shaping Stalin's rise, the author does a brilliant job in discussing and highlighting many of the more "colorful" events in his young life. These events include Stalin's many, many affairs and several illegitimate children, how his amazing calmness and coldness allowed him to intimidate or control countless lackies nearly all of whom he later discarded, how he survived astonishingly brutal stretches of exile in Siberia, in particular a four year stretch on the Artic Circle in an area that is closer to being a hellhole that any other place imaginable, his many escapes from bumbling Tsarist police, and many other great tales. The author's writing is sharp and lively, and he well bolsters these and other stories with copious amounts of starred-* notes at the bottom nearly every page providing details of forgotten stories. Specifically, I loved how the author would tell what later became of the hundreds of people who Stalin came across in his youth; not surprisingly, nearly all of them despite often strong loyalty, were later imprisoned and/or killed by Stalin once he became supreme leader of the country. While the author acknowledges time and again what an astonishing brute and killer Stalin would later become, he does so with kind of a bemusement. Indeed, while it is easier to slap that label on Hitler because he was such a cold-hearted martinet, it is tougher with Stalin simply because he had so much personality, charisma, and wit! He really was a fascinating figure. As I noted above, the author has constructed such a sharp look at Stalin by tapping dozens of unpublished memoirs of former associates and friends of Stalin, many of whom he later forgot or destroyed.

After finishing this book, I was struck by what a mystery Stalin was, and continues to be. While the book well captures his ferocity, brilliance, zealotry, taste for young girls, lack of loyalty to even his closest friends, cold heart, and difficult upbringing, I think the author well encapsulates Stalin when, near the end, he simply calls him "weird". Despite possessing strong intelligence, a loving mother, and many loyal friends and colleagues, he was a thug who reveled in violence and mayhem, and when he became leader, he liquidated even his closest allies. The reason he became that man? Well, that's impossible to say, even with this great book. Needless to say that his cold heart made it easier for him to treat people so poorly and always possess the view that human life had almost no value.

This is a very impressive book. I'm not trying to repeat myself, I just came away with that feeling. The book does not tackle the heady diplomatic and war decisions in Stalin's later life -- those are in the author's other book on Stalin -- but focuses on his early life and many of the fascinating gossipy elements that aren't widely known. It's a little long (nearly 400 pages), but an easy and fun read. If you're a student of any history, it is well worth your time.

Five stars.

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