THE YOUNG AND THE RUTHLESS

The Washington Post
November 4, 2007 Sunday
Every Edition

Stalin was a precocious gangster, robber and arsonist.

Reviewed by Ronald Grigor Suny

BOOK WORLD; Pg. BW07

YOUNG STALIN
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Knopf. 460 pp. $30

For centuries travelers in Caucasia have depicted that mountainous
land as a mysterious, enchanted place where the locals are savage
and noble, the terrain majestic and wild, the rivers always turbulent.

But exoticizing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan has had a dangerous
side effect: a tendency, particularly pronounced among Russians, to
demonize Caucasians as bandits, terrorists and cheats. Caucasia’s most
famous son was one of the greatest tyrants of the 20th century, Joseph
Stalin. And so it was probably inevitable that biographers would look
for some cultural link with the "wild East" to explain the ferocity
of a man who at his zenith devoured millions of Soviet citizens.

British novelist and filmmaker Simon Sebag Montefiore has long
been obsessed with Stalin and Caucasia. His initial foray into
Staliniana was a comic novel, My Affair With Stalin, in which a
malevolent 11-year-old adopts the dictator’s tactics to dominate
his schoolmates. Reborn as a popular historian, Montefiore wrote
biographies of Catherine the Great’s lover, Potemkin, and of Stalin
at the height of his power. A prodigious researcher, Montefiore has
found new archival sources, interviewed survivors and visited the
haunts and homes of the great dictator to produce a prequel to his
700-page In the Court of the Red Tsar.

Montefiore enfolds even what is familiar about Stalin in a vivid
narrative rich with new details and sensational revelations. The
future revolutionary was born in the provincial town of Gori, the
son of a shoemaker, Beso Djugashvili, and his stern, religious wife,
Keke. Determined that her "Soso" should become a priest, Keke sent
him to seminaries where the precocious boy displayed a talent for
singing and poetry and shared the romantic Georgian nationalism of his
compatriots. But as a teenager, embittered by the draconian regime
of teacher-priests, Soso abandoned both church and nationalism and
joined the fledgling Marxist movement.

Adopting the nickname "Koba" from a fictional Georgian outlaw,
young Djugashvili soon became a militant activist, leading workers
into a bloody confrontation with the police and organizing an armed
terrorist band that knocked off enemies and staged daring robberies
to finance the party. Stalin was repeatedly arrested and exiled to
Siberia, only to escape and resume his work in the revolutionary
underground. Rumors spread that he had ties to the tsarist police,
but such speculations testify more to his continual intrigues than
to any role as an agent of the infamous Okhrana.

Leading us through these obscure years of Stalin’s revolutionary
evolution, Montefiore focuses almost exclusively on his personal
rather than political side. Young Stalin is already a "gangster
godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist," a
Marxist fanatic with a need to command and dominate. The Caucasus
was the essential environment in which this "murderous egomaniac"
was nurtured. The violence of the Russian Empire’s southern periphery
— where rebellious workers, peasants, anarchists and Marxists vied
for power despite the state’s brutal reprisals — shaped Stalin’s
conviction that bloodshed and terror were necessary means to his
desired ends. "Only in Georgia," Montefiore writes, "could Stalin the
poet enable Stalin the gangster." Even Koba’s intimate relationships
were perverse. He neglected his devout and devoted mother, subordinated
his first wife to his revolutionary work, which led to her death,
and took up with whatever woman, regardless of age, could satisfy his
appetites. "Stalin," Montefiore claims, "was attracted to strong women,
but ultimately preferred submissive housewives or teenagers."

Stalin as womanizer is a new angle on the man of steel, though the
evidence for his sexual exploits, while tantalizing, is thin. In fact,
Montefiore’s portrait is often overwrought, and as an explanation of
Stalin’s path to power, it falls short, failing to deal adequately with
his politics and thought. There is almost nothing in this book, for
instance, on his intense involvement in the internal party squabbles
among the Marxists or his role as a theorist of nationalism. Geography
may be important, but it is insufficient context for a historian.

Growing up in autocratic Russia, where suppression of open political
dissent convinced thousands of people that the only way out of
backwardness and oppression was armed rebellion, Stalin was in one
sense not very unusual. But in another he was unique. His particular
talents and lack of scruples enabled him to climb rapidly up the
ladder of party politics, to impress Lenin and to build a loyal
following. In February 1917, Stalin was far from the action, still
exiled in the bitter darkness of eastern Siberia. Yet he was well
poised when the revolution opened opportunities for those prepared
to seize them. For all its drama, Young Stalin leaves that deadly
progression still a mystery. ·

Ronald Grigor Suny, the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social
and Political History at the University of Michigan, is editor of
"The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. III: The Twentieth Century."

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