A brilliant thug
YOUNG STALIN
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
496 pp. Knopf $30
Reviewed by Clive Foss
Picture a devout, immaculately dressed ten-year old pupil in a church school. He’s its best reader of psalms, a straight-A student, a voracious reader with an astonishing memory, with such a sweet voice that he was hired out to sing at weddings. Picture, too, a suspicious young brawler with a chip on his shoulder who never hesitated to fight boys much bigger than himself, who resented authority and insisted on being the leader and had a kind of magnetism that attracted followers; who was frequently beaten by his drunken father and sometimes by the doting mother who so spoiled him that he believed he was always right. Put the images together and you have young Soso Djugashvili, who grew up to be one of the great mass-murderers of all time: Josef Stalin.
This amazing book delves deep into Stalin’s background, tracing his career from birth till the triumph of the Revolution in 1917, when he was 38 or 39 (he may have faked his birth date to avoid the draft; in any case, he never served in the military). It presents a complex and convincing picture of the development of a highly talented, often companionable, unscrupulous, merciless, egotistical thug and political activist who became one of the most powerful men on earth.
Normally it is extremely difficult to reconstruct the origins of a dictator’s character. Writers fall back on the tyrant’s own self-serving accounts of his youth (Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mussolini’s Autobiography, Mao’s talks with Edgar Snow) and supplement them as best they can. Alternatively, they turn to the wild theorizings of psycho-history, trying to imagine the traumas of infancy and early childhood. Sebag Montefiore avoids all this by exploiting material from newly opened archives in Russia and especially Georgia, by visiting all the relevant places, and by interviewing virtually everyone whose family had connections with the young Stalin. He provides a clear and often gripping narrative, but never loses sight of a central question: how far does Stalin’s youth explain the workings of his Soviet Union? A great deal, as it turns out. The only problems for the uninitiated reader are names and dates. There is a constant tide of people with unfamiliar and often unpronounceable names (try Tskhakaya or Chkheidze), and a swirl of events hard to follow as Stalin moves or is moved from one place to the other. For the first, Montefiore helpfully provides a list of characters; for the movements, a time-line might have helped. But these are minor criticisms.
The book opens by dramatically plunging the reader into a revealing event: the great bank robbery of 1907, when a band of revolutionaries threw bombs in the main square of Tiflis, Georgia’s capital, killed guards and innocent bystanders, and hijacked a quarter of a million rubles. Stalin, the organizer, stayed in the background; the money went to Lenin. Here is the skilful ruthless gangster who grew out of the devout schoolboy.
Stalin saw the light in Gori (the only place where his statue still stands), a notoriously tough town whose natives celebrated their holidays with violent free-for-all gang fights. Drink drove his father, Beso, a cobbler, to failure. For a while, he worked with his father in the shoe factory, the only hard labor the Leader of the World Proletariat ever did. In 1894, he entered the seminary: the Russian regime did not offer advanced secular education to such turbulent subjects as the Georgians, and his mother hoped he would become a bishop. Here he got the higher education that formed one of the bases of his success. He read extensively in literature and politics, including Plato in the original Greek, Victor Hugo, and Shakespeare, as well as the poetry that he could quote at great length, even from Walt Whitman. He started to write romantic poetry of his own, but also read Marx and radical works that converted him to the cause of revolution. When he left the seminary in 1899 (not expelled for Marxism as usually said, but for not paying tuition), he became and remained a full-time activist. The church taught him a great deal: it influenced his style and attitudes and, thanks to a priest who took a particular dislike to him, gave him unplanned lessons in surveillance, spying, and intrusion on private life.
Djugashvili then started to agitate and organise meetings, activities that kept him on the run from the authorities and meant that he lived in the atmosphere of conspiracy and treachery that would eventually mark the Soviet Union. In the oil port of Batum in 1901, he ordered his first killing, blackmailed refinery owners, and wrote extensively in the underground press. In jail for the first time the next year, he used the opportunity to study, as he did in a relatively comfortable exile in Siberia in 1903, where the Tsar provided travel money and the prisoners were not confined but allowed to receive post and money from home. Between 1903 and 1914 he was arrested nine times and escaped eight.
Both in exile and during the interludes of freedom he usually spent in the Caucasus, he manifested the skills that brought him success. In Siberia, he broke the unwritten rules of exiles by associating with criminals more than the windbag intellectuals he despised. He also stayed in touch with Lenin, who came to regard him very highly, and seduced whatever women were at hand. One never thought of the mature Stalin as a ladies’ man, but during these years he was every bit as active as, say, Mussolini. He liked whoever was available locally and had a certain fondness for teenagers: one of his hottest relationships was with a sixteen-year-old Siberian girl who uniquely was allowed to tease him. One of her successors, aged 13, was seduced, impregnated and produced a child (whom Stalin later ignored). He also had a green thumb, a skill that never left him, and was adept at hunting and fishing even in the coldest weather. He sometimes lived in self-chosen solitude in a tiny cabin. Back in civilisation, he was a shakedown artist, kidnapper, bank robber, pirate and gang leader. At the same time, he was often the life of the party, singing, joking and entertaining. He always had a following and never deviated from Lenin’s version of Bolshevism. His criminal and conspiratorial skills enabled him to raise money for the party and to carry on despite constant danger, while his education and incessant reading qualified him for success among the intellectuals of the Party and enabled him to attract Lenin’s attention and then praise.
In 1912, he visited Lenin in Cracow and got the critical assignment of solving the nationalities problem—Russia had hundreds of them—from a Bolshevik perspective; Lenin liked the results and became the ardent patron of the man who by now had adopted his final alias, Stalin, “Man of Steel.” Lenin and Stalin shared the same attitudes and approved the same methods; they cooperated closely despite the difference in their backgrounds. But here Montefiore seems to exaggerate by consistently portraying Lenin as an aristocrat, though his father had only gained respectability and a patent of nobility because of his government post; the family was essentially middle class, and in no way did Lenin behave like a traditional hereditary aristocrat. Stalin next went to Vienna where, Montefiore says, he had his first and last experience of civilized European life. Ironically, he was in Vienna at the same time as the young Hitler, but the two never met. Actually, Stalin had already been in Europe, notably in London for a Party congress in 1907, but then he lived in East End squalor. This was the occasion on which he met Trotsky; it was hate at first sight. Betrayed and arrested in 1913, he was sent to such a remote part of Siberia that he didn’t manage to get away till the first Russian revolution had already happened, but he soon moved into an important role, and here the book ends.
There is a lot to like in this volume, especially its revolutionary portrait of a man whom Trotsky, followed by many modern writers, dismissed as a dull plodder. In fact, by 1917, Stalin had developed a highly skilled, complex, contradictory character that allowed him to deal with people from all levels of society, and to adapt to and exploit the most diverse circumstances. Both his criminal side, which Montefiore brings out in full detail, and his education paved the way to the power that enabled him to impose his dark view of human relations on hundreds of millions of people. Anyone reading this book would do well to follow it with the same author’s equally revealing Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar (2003), which covers 1932-1953, and hope that Montefiore will produce a third volume to bridge the gap between them and explain how this brilliant thug rose to supreme power.
Clive Foss teaches history at Georgetown University, Washington DC, where he offers courses in the history of dictatorship, as well as the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. His most recent books are Fidel Castro and The Tyrants, both published in 2006.
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