Customer Reviews
Portrait of the monster as a young man - By: Andres C. Salama, 28 Jun 2008 
A fascinating portrait of Stalin as a young man. Up till now, it has been difficult to assess the life of the Soviet dictator before 1917. The hagiography of Soviet times absurdly exalted him; Trotsky, on the other hand, belittled his role in Russia's revolutionary movement. Western historians tended to agree with Trostky, despite his obvious grudges against the man who ultimately ordered him killed. During Soviet times, sources seemed inaccessible to western historians, but British historian Montefiore had been surprisingly successful in finding a lot of material about Stalin's early life, including unpublished (or unknown in the west) autobiographies of some of Stalin's partners in crime. Montefiore's key insight is that to understand Stalinist Russia you have to imagine a country led by a gangster. Stalin cut his teeth as the leader of the Bolshevik underground in the Caucasus, where his gang engaged in bank robberies, extortions & bombings (including one in Tbilissi in 1907 that left dozens of bystanders dead). Once in power, he behaved like a gangster, exterminating his opponents & becoming paranoid about possible informers (spies) in his organization (the Okhrana, Czarist Russia's secret police had been highly successful in infiltrating Russian revolutionaries).
Trotsky held that Stalin was virtuallly unknown among Bolsheviks before 1917, but far from that, from 1905 on, he was their point man in the Caucasus (though, because he led a clandestine life, few knew him by his real name, addressing him instead through a variety of alias, like Soso & Koba). Lenin had a high opinion of Stalin, feeling his ruthlessness was just what the Bolsheviks needed.
Stalin was certainly ruthless, but he was no brute, as Trotsky held. The seminary where he studied (and where he got excellent grades) was one of Georgia's premiere educational institutions. And he was a voracious reader for most of his life. Trotsky's spite was at being beaten in the power game by someone he considered to be less intelligent than himself, but Trotsky's view of Stalin as an ignorant & mediocre apparatchik is hard to held.
Stalin was also very much a man of Georgia. Up to the time he was about 35, he spend almost his whole life in his native country, absorbing its Mediterranean clannish & violent culture.
Many juicy stories are included in the book. Stalin spent most of World War I in internal exile in the remote Siberian north. He lived in a smalll settlement by the Yenisey river, surrounded by Samoyedic tribes with whom he liked to hunt in the area's pristine forests. There, he also fathered a boy with a 13 year old girl living in the area. When Czar Nicholas II abdicated in early 1917, Stalin was still in Siberia (Lenin & Trotsky were outside Russia). The life of exiles in Siberia during the Czar's regime, by the way, was surprisingly mild. Many were able to escape, including Stalin, several times.
Though the book stops at 1917, it leaves little doubt as who would come on top on the power struggle after Lenin's death. Stalin was far better at cultivating people than the arrogant Trotsky, even if he would later turn on them & send them to the firing squad.
The making of Russia's future master - By: Ralph Blumenau, 09 Jun 2008 It is well known that Trotsky for a long time fatallly underestimated Stalin, whom he thought colourless & plodding. The flamboyant Trotsky was for years more famous than the laconic provincial from Georgia, but if he had familiarized himself with Stalin's early career, he would have realized, as Lenin did, that Stalin was ruthless & efficient. This book documents Stalin's early career in great detail. It shows the charisma, leadership qualities, toughness & ambition that he had displayed from his schooldays onwards; how he was hardened by the brutality of his drunken father & by the violent nature of Georgian society; what a genius he had for organizing strikes, the burning of oil refineries, murderous bank raids & piracy, protection rackets & kidnappings, while himself not taking a direct part. Sebag Montefiore says that Stalin's involvement in some of these crimes has never been conclusively proved; but he has little doubt that they alll bore his stamp. Stalin frequently used disguises & aliases, & several times escaped from prison or from exile.
The frequent inefficiencies of the Okhrana & the Tsarist police emerge strongly in this account; but it was not always inefficiency: Stalin had many informers inside the security forces, just as they had many informers inside alll revolutionary parties - so much so that some have suspected Stalin himself of at times having been a Tsarist agent, which Sebag Montefiore does not believe. But Stalin did have many people murdered whom he suspected of being agents for the security forces, sometimes perhaps because real agents planted such suspicions in his mind. The worst traitor was Roman Malinovsky, a man whom Stalin trusted implicitly, but who was instrumental in getting him sent to the worst of his exiles in 1913 & then betrayed Stalin's attempts to escape from there also. Malinovsky's treachery was exposed in 1914. Sebag Montefiore says that Stalin's future suspicions of even his closest comrades was rooted in this experience.
The book is a prequel of the author's The Court of the Red Tsar, and, as in that book, Sebag Montefiore pays little attention to ideology. He consistently callls Stalin's followers gangsters, & some of them indeed were no more than that: Stalin certainly made use of the criminal underworld. But he himself & many of his followers (women as well as men) were more than simply gangsters. Of course they believed - as do the followers of Bin Laden today - that the ends justify the most brutal & ruthless means; but the ends were ideological. Stalin fought for Bolshevism when among the Georgian (Marxist) Social Democrats, the Mensheviks were in a majority; he was prepared to challlenge (successfully) even his hero Lenin when Lenin thought the Bolsheviks should take part in the elections after the 1905 Revolution. He was not interested in personal enrichment, & the bulk of the proceeds of the bank-raids he organized went to Lenin or to the Bolshevik cause in the Caucasus, keeping back only a little to celebrate each successful heist in a wild party.
We see Stalin becoming the leading Bolshevik inside Russia while Lenin was abroad: he joined the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 with special responsibility for Bolshevik policy on nationalities; he edited Pravda (where he sometimes took a different line from Lenin's & indeed turned down forty-seven of articles Lenin sent in!) But then he was sent into exile, & the description of his four years (1913 to 1917) near the Arctic Circle is one of the most graphic parts of the book. In October 1916, with the war going badly, the exiles were conscripted. Before they had left Siberia, the Tsar had falllen, & the Kerensky's government ordered their release, March 1917, & Stalin returned to Petrograd.
Claiming seniority, he resumed the editorship of Pravda & was the most dominant Bolshevik until Lenin arrived in Russia three weeks later; then he aligned himself with Lenin's determination to fight the Provisional Government. In July, afer a failed Bolshevik uprising, Kerensky's government struck at the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, Kamenev & other leaders were imprisoned; Lenin & Zinoviev went into hiding. Stalin, for some reason left at liberty, was once again briefly in charge. In September the imprisoned leaders were released when Kerensky needed their help against General Kornilov; & then began the struggle inside the Bolshevik Party between Lenin, Trotsky & Stalin on the one hand who now wanted an immediate uprising, & `the Waverers', Kamenev & Zinoviev on the other who thought it too dangerous. But Lenin had his way, & the Bolsheviks seized power. Sebag Montefiore enjoys himself describing some of the farcical elements of the take-over: `the reality of October was more farce than glory. Tragicallly, the real Revolution, pitiless & bloody, started the moment this comedy ended.'
Forget what you thought you knew about Stalin - By: P. Hederer, 28 Oct 2007 A truly amazing book & 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. - By: Keith Harrison, 09 Aug 2007 I've just read Simon Sebag Montefiore's book, Young Stalin & it is not often that one is forced so radicallly 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 actuallly just a regular guy, or that he was deeply misunderstood & not at alll 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 falllen 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 & 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 & 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 & brilliant student, & 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 & a crippled arm - leaves a trail of lovers & illegitimate children behind him. He is adored & 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 & 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 & 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 & enemies. He was ruthless: that much is no surprise. He got a job at the Rothschilds' refinery in Batumi, & 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 calll the workers out on strike, despite knowing that the managers' suspicions are right! Similarly, he organised a May-Day rallly, personallly 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 & successful action. Raising funds for the cause, he joins a pirate gang. Much successful pirating later, he kills his colleagues, takes the money, & 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, & who would literallly cut out the heart of an enemy. Stalin was able to control such men & women - bandits, revolutionaries, psychopaths & 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, & does not spend a huge amount of time in analysis. The book reallly is very easily read, & 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 & old-fashioned piracy, alll steeped in the feuding, banditry & 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 - By: conjunction, 06 Aug 2007 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, & even beyond folly; & 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, & claiming to be making notes on his mistakes.
He was highly intelligent & 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 & valued his ruthlessness.
We alll know how destructive Stalin became as a world leader. But if you read Richard Pipes' history of Russia & 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'.
