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Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin tells the story of the Soviet monster's life as a daring gangster in pre-revolutionary Russia
According to the Newsweek review,
"Young Stalin" is much more than an expansion of the first chapters in that biography: it's a full portrait of the young man. In this case, "young" means right up until the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, when he was almost 40.
Once again tapping into a rich vein of material from previously closed archives in Russia and Georgia, Montefiore has produced a portrait of the young Stalin that is complex and morbidly fascinating. In this age of terror, it's also a timely reminder of the terrorist origins of the Bolshevik revolutionaries who would soon unleash mass murder on a previously unimaginable scale.
The son of a drunken cobbler and a strong-willed mother, Josef Djugashvili, as he was originally called, was raised in conflict. At home, the struggle was between his parents, who soon went their separate ways. His father, known as "Crazy Beso," vented his fury on both his wife and his son. "Undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father himself," a schoolmate of the young Stalin recalled. The father wanted him to learn his trade and work with him in a shoe factory, while his mother insisted that he go to school. The history of the last century might have been dramatically different if the father had prevailed. Instead, his father dropped out of his life, and Stalin became a star pupil—"the best and the naughtiest," according to the schoolmate. He then entered the seminary, but quickly switched his focus from religion to revolution. "Stalin owed his political success to his unusual combination of street brutality and classical education," Montefiore writes.
Even as Stalin was writing poetry and singing in a "beautiful, sweet high voice," as one of his teachers put it, he was learning about street fighting. He soon moved into the shadowy world of gangsters, revolutionaries and tsarist secret agents. Conflicting loyalties could be regional, political or mercenary—or all of those. "A Georgian upbringing was the ideal training for the terrorist-gangster," Montefiore writes. Stalin was quick to accuse the innocent of betrayal, but, in his early days working under Lenin's leadership, he managed to miss the biggest real agent planted in the Bolshevik leadership. That only fed the paranoia—and insatiable thirst for revenge—that would know no bounds once he took power."
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