Young Stalin

Having read and re-read Montefiore’s “Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar” I couldn’t resist this one. I wouldn’t have thought he could have outdone his research successes in the latter book but I was wrong. This is one of the most important books to be written on the Russian Revolution, not just about Stalin but about the society and environment in which he grew up and operated. One of the major points made here is that much of what we know or thought we knew about Stalin comes from Trotsky’s 1940 biography. In fact Stalin was not the unlettered bureaucrat that Trotsky would have us believe but a much more interesting and complex figure, and also far better educated (although self-educated). None of this can excuse the horrors of his rule, but that lies in the future of this book. (Trotsky probably would have been just as bloodthirsty had he succeeded to Lenin’s rule, but that is just a personal opinion here). In “Young Stalin” you get a vivid picture of Georgia and Russia in the pre-revolutionary period, right down to the village level (and also the level of prisons and exile). A major triumph of historiography!

Amazing book. Probably the definitive bio of the young Stalin. Should be read along with Montefiore’s equally excellent “Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar”, which picks up the story from just after Stalin gained real power in the Bolshevik Kremlin, in the mid-1920s. Montefiore reveals every crevasse of Stalin’s evolving personality, one based on silence and revenge. He never, psychologically, outgrew his early days as an adolescent thug and delinquent; when he met Lenin and was captured forever by Bolshevism, he only became worse. Montefiore reveals that for Stalin, even as a young man, there was only one law, and that law was death. I would recommend this bio, along with “Red Tsar”, to anyone wishing to understand the monstrousness of the system of Soviet Communism and its three decades under the Vozhd.

In high school or even college how much did we learn about Stalin? Purges, psycho, leader, Red, and madman….he is these things, but the book lends incredible insight into the complexities of a personality that became a cult of personality. How else can we understand someone or a part of history if we only take in the mainstream narrow view of those who write for reasons of persuasion. For one thing this book reminds of us is how critical parenting is. His mother and father had issues but also strengths. Seems the issues trumped the strengths in many ways. Stalin could have been one who contributed in good ways to the world but seems his track in life brought him to act without humanity or conscience. His genius was titled in favor of paranoia and tyranny leaving us with the horror stories of history. I would think those who do historical psycho analysis would be hard pressed to find one so interesting and terrifying as this man who seems to have had more than 9 lives under his belt. Where is the next socio-path going to arise from….it might be from amongst our own tribes….teach your children well….and hopefully their father’s hell will slowly go by….unfortunately it didn’t for Mr. J Stalin.

One note….I think the author good have edited the starting chapters on Stalin’s boyhood….kind of repetitive and cycling back and forth….a bit jarring….but still a great read.

Montefiore’s biography of the young Stalin is both humanizing and surprisingly fair-minded. Montefiore is not inclined to like Stalin and is fairly anti-Bolshevik overall, and yet, Montefiore does not continuance every conspiracy theory about Stalin’s early life nor reveal only in the seedy details–although there are plenty. Montefiore is accessible, writing in short chapters, and explaining context without becoming exhaustive. This is one book, however, where it does really pay to read the chapter foot notes. Starting the book with his bank heist to fund the Bolsheviks in the early 1900s but almost cost him his relationship to either form of the SDs, and working to in the center was a brilliant structure to the book. This puts the wildness of Stalin’s early years in perspective. There are a lot of names to keep up with–particularly since everyone goes by several aliases–but Montefiore does his best to keep all in perspective. Montefiore also does use a lot of secret archive memoirs and letters to construct a much more viable narrative that had be available on this period prior. An excellent introduction to not only Stalin but the tense political situation in the caucuses during the turn of the last century as well.

An elegantly perfumed Romance Novella but also simultaneously and horridly representing an inspirational guidebook for our future sociopathic malignant narcissist aspirants. This book will soon be a movie no doubt.
My favorite elements are the wonderous descriptions of how pleasant Siberian exile was for the protagonists as exemplified by the following referenced quotation of Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov:
I eat fish. My landlady makes me pies. I have sturgeon, white salmon with battered potatoes and cavier, salted sturgeon, sometimes I eat them raw. I feel too energyless even to add vinegar. Ive ended all regular life. I eat irregularly. I study nothing. I go to sleep at odd times. Sometimes I walk for the whole night, sometimes I sleep at 10 am.
I think any city dweller in America would sign up for that torture.
Great historians sometimes lose their compass which is what I am afraid happened in this publication.

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