Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Continuing my effort to read more books about Russia, I just finished the nonfiction work, Young Stalin. As the title would imply, the primary focus was on Stalin’s life from birth until he came to power, well before his Great Terror when he was responsible for the death of about 1.5 million citizens of his country. In a nutshell, Stalin was a sociopath, paranoid, and a remarkable opportunist. If his life and the history of Russia are of interest to you, then this book will be a good one for you. Otherwise, probably not. It reads more like a novel than a history text.

Montefiore captured Stalin’s early life thuggery when he financially supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power through bank robberies and piracy. The author chronicled Stalin’s multiple arrests by the tsarist regime, his eight periods of exile (one lasting for four years deep in the remote north of Siberia), and his numerous escapes from custody. He was the son of a drunken shoe cobbler who read voraciously and became a published poet.

The author aptly referred to Stalin as having “that rare combination: both ‘intellectual’ and killer.” Near the end of the book, after cataloging Stalin’s early murderous exploits, unbridled sexual exploits (often with young teenage girls), and obvious lack of regard even for the innocents that he killed, Montefiore wrote, “He could not have risen to power at any other time in history: it required the synchronicity of man and moment. His unlikely rise as a Georgian who could rule Russia was only made possible by the internationalist character of Marxism. His tyranny was made possible by the beleaguered circumstance of Soviet Russia, the utopian fanaticism of his quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the great War, and Lenin’s homicidal vision of a ’dictatorship of the proletariat.’” Within months of the October 1917 revolution, Lenin and his magnates used their new power to fight and win the Civil War, and thereby cement their control of the country. “It was then that Stalin, along with his cohorts, experienced that unrestrained power to wage war and change society by random killing. Like boys on their first foxhunt, they were blooded by the exhilaration and swagger. Stalin’s character, damaged yet gifted, was qualified for, and fatally attracted to, such pitiless predations. Afterwards, the machine of repression, the flinthearted, paranoid psychology of perpetual conspiracy and the taste for extreme bloody solutions to all challenges, were not just ascendant but glamorized, institutionalized and raised to an amoral Bolshevik faith with messianic fervor.”

The author referred to Stalin as “both man of violence and of ideas, an expert in gangsterism, as well as a devout Marxist; but above all, he believed in himself and in his own ruthless leadership as the only way to govern a country in crisis and to promote a mere ideal to a real utopia.”