Young Stalin

A truly amazing book and a tour de force for the historian. A great example of finding fresh fields to plow in what would seem to be a very gone over subject.
If you're interested in the man or the times this is a must read.

A vivid, exciting, disturbing tale. (11/13 people found this helpful)

I've just read Simon Sebag Montefiore's book, Young Stalin and it is not often that one is forced so radically to alter one's entire view of someone so famous.

I am not saying that I came away from the book struck by how Stalin was actually just a regular guy, or that he was deeply misunderstood and not at all a monster. Anything but: the Stalin presented to us is quite clearly a case of the boy as father of the man.

But I - like just about everyone else in the West, I should say - had always fallen for Trotsky's version of events. I thought that Stalin's early life was that of a grey, dour, methodical man who ground his way to the stop through scheming, opportunism and a mastery of the processes of bureaucracy. I had a view of him as the methodical counterpart to Hitler's sub-artistic, charismatic leader of men: an impression gleaned in large part from Allan Bullock's great study of the pair.

In fact, it transpires that the young Stalin - or Soso, as he was known by many at the time - was by far the more glamourous, artistic and even charismatic. While Hitler daubed postcards, Stalin wrote poetry. And not doggerel: Stalin organised a huge bank robbery in Georgia - one reported around the world at the time - thanks largely to having someone on the inside. That insider helped Stalin because of his love of the young revolutionary's poetry: poetry written as a schoolboy which, nonetheless, was published widely long before Soso became Stalin. He was a beautiful singer, a dedicated and brilliant student, and a talented (if sometimes mercurial) teacher. The later cult of personality had much to work with.

This Stalin - despite the pockmarks of childhood disease, a limp and a crippled arm - leaves a trail of lovers and illegitimate children behind him. He is adored and feared. Ominously, he already has an obsession with betrayal by the time he is a seminarian training for the priesthood. In his teens, he beats and organises the ostracisation of a former friend who betrays one of his circle. By his early twenties, a police spy is murdered after Stalin (correctly) guesses at his pretense. He has potential recruits lead past him in the street, while he stands behind a window and watches. Some, he chooses. Others, he rejects as traitors. He believes he can tell a spy at a glance. And in Georgia, agents of the police are everywhere.

Was Stalin one of them? Montefiore certainly leaves us with the impression that Stalin played a double game, using the police to get rid of rivals and enemies. He was ruthless: that much is no surprise. He got a job at the Rothschilds' refinery in Batumi, and almost immediately had it set ablaze. The workers fight the fire, which entitled them to a bonus. But, as Stalin surely knew, the bonus was not paid, due to the suspicion of arson. So Stalin then uses that to call the workers out on strike, despite knowing that the managers' suspicions are right! Similarly, he organised a May-Day rally, personally encouraged the workers to attack, assuring them that the Cossacks would not shoot them, clearly despite knowing that the soldiers certainly would do just that. Then he uses the resulting deaths to his own ends. Stalin was already casual with the lives of others, in order to promote the cause.

He was also, unlike Hitler, a young man of repeated and successful action. Raising funds for the cause, he joins a pirate gang. Much successful pirating later, he kills his colleagues, takes the money, and takes it back across the Caucasus on donkey-back, quoting his own poetry as he goes. This Stalin appealed greatly to Lenin, who saw Stalin as a direct man of action, long before his rise to prominence in 1917. The directness Lenin meant can be seen in Stalin's right-hand man - Kamo - who would beg Stalin to let him slit the throats of victims, and who would literally cut out the heart of an enemy. Stalin was able to control such men and women - bandits, revolutionaries, psychopaths and conspirators alike - because they wanted to follow "the young man with the burning eyes". This is very unlike the Stalin I thought I knew.

Montefiore tells a tale, and does not spend a huge amount of time in analysis. The book really is very easily read, and never risks dryness or abstraction.

In summary, Montefiore's book paints a wicked young man, of great strength, a voracious lover, a leader of dangerous sociopaths, whose story is one of brawls, riots, robbery, escapes from the tundra, seductions and old-fashioned piracy, all steeped in the feuding, banditry and archaic traditions of the Caucasus. With the young Hitler, the trouble is often remaining awake. With the young Stalin, the issue is more one of avoiding a grudging admiration.

A Brilliant Picture of the Young Stalin (9/14 people found this helpful)

Montefiore focuses on many sources only available since glasnost to reveal much about Stalin's early life. In doing so we learn much about Stalin as a passionate Georgian - he nearly got kicked out of the Party at one stage for wanting a Georgian version of Bolshevism. We also learn he was a remarkably talented poet, even in translation; courageous to the point of, and even beyond folly; and utterly committed to his cause as well as being a lifelong committed student. When his comrades were carousing Stalin could be found lying on the floor at a party reading Napoleon's memoirs, and claiming to be making notes on his mistakes.

He was highly intelligent and possessed enormous self-discipline which he put at the disposal of the revolution. Unlike some histories I have read, Montefiore makes it clear that Lenin knew him well and valued his ruthlessness.

We all know how destructive Stalin became as a world leader. But if you read Richard Pipes' history of Russia and become aware of how ill-equipped Russia was as a modern state at the time of the Revolution perhaps it becomes possible to make sense of how someone like Stalin could be as aware of a sense of destiny as he apparently was. This also comes out in Montefiore's other book, the 'Court of the Red Tsar'.

Outstanding (63/68 people found this helpful)

A simply superb account of Stalin's early years, with an unparalleled depth of research. I had thought that Edward Ellis Smith's 'The Young Stalin' would be near-impossible to beat, but Sebag Montefiore has made important and revealing discoveries, not just in Moscow archives, but crucially in Georgia too.
For the first time, Stalin's pre-Revolutionary career as a professional revolutionary-cum-gangster, organising robberies - including the famous Tiflis one of 1907 - extortion, arson, piracy and murder is comprehensively laid out. But the author also shows that Stalin's political organisational skills, his importance to Lenin and to the Bolshevik movement - and the reasons for them - have been underplayed by enemies like Trotsky, who called him a 'mediocrity', so we get a more fully-rounded view of the young Stalin than was available previously, and one that helps explain his subsequent rise to power.
The author states that the book is the result of almost ten years of research, and he has truly found astonishing new sources. For example, memoirs about Stalin collected in Russia before the Terror in 1937 were often found to be surprisingly frank, tactless or derogatory - but they were not destroyed. They were simply preserved in the archives, and they have survived.
Stalin's attractiveness to women, and an impressive love-life - even when on the run - is laid out too, right down to the secret 1956 KGB investigation into Stalin's seduction and impregnation of a 13-year old girl during one of his Siberian exiles.
The author's interviewees even include a 107-year old woman relative of Stalin's first wife Kato, who told of the young couple's married life, how Stalin's in-laws blamed him for her early death at 22, and how Stalin lost control at the funeral and threw himself into the grave with the coffin.
The style is immensely readable too, never losing sight of the human factors amidst the detail, with well-written, compact chapters.
I enjoyed the author's previous work on Stalin : 'The Court of the Red Tsar', and would recommend both books to anyone interested in the subject matter. (I am also amazed that no televison company seems to have seen the potential to use the books as a basis for documentary programmes.)

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Reader Reviews:

Forget what you thought you knew about Stalin (0/0 people found this helpful)

A vivid, exciting, disturbing tale. (11/13 people found this helpful)

A Brilliant Picture of the Young Stalin (9/14 people found this helpful)

Outstanding (63/68 people found this helpful)

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