Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21733 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE
[This] substantial book shines a stark light into the murky underworld of Stalin's revoluntary apprenticeship.'

Review
'a gripping read.....the book provides a wealth of serious and scurrilous detail, creating a memorable portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest monsters.' (Antony Beevor THE DAILY TELEGRAPH )

'an outstanding book..... a triumph of research and storytelling.' (Victor Sebestyen THE EVENING STANDARD )

'The story Montefiore has told requires the psychological penetration and social omniscience of a great novelist. Dickens once or twice peeps over the biographer's shoulder (Peter Conrad THE OBSERVER )

'it is hard to imagine how this account can be improved on. Moreover, the narrative flows with insight and humour: YOUNG STALIN is a prequel that outshines even the COURT OF THE RED TSAR.' (Donald Rayfield LITERARY REVIEW )

'This picture of Stalin as a young poet is one of the revelations of Simon Sebag Montefiore's macabrely fascinating Young Stalin' (Antonia Fraser THE MAIL ON SUNDAY )

'Simon Sebag Montefiore's thrilling portrait of Stalin's youth.' (Michael Burleigh THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

'on one level, this book does the important work of helping one understand exactly how the phenomena of Stalin and Stalinism came into existence: on another it's also a very good story, very well told' (Paul Fishmann WATERSTONE'S BOOK QUARTERLY )

'The aim of any book is to inform, entertain, and be readable, and this book does so admirably, and frequently with a sense of humour.' (Jennie Erdal THE SCOTSMAN )

'What Montefiore gives us is a richly and fluently documented study of the chief terrorist in the making.' (Robert Service THE SUNDAY TIMES )

'This meticulous volume.' (Gavin Bowd SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY )

'this magnificent 'prequel' (Jonathan Mirsky THE SPECTATOR )

'Montefiore's wonderfully readable book' (Hugh Barnes THE NEW STATESMAN )

'In showing the boy brigand, he illuminates, uniquely, the elements - diverse and contradictory as they are - that fathered the man-monster; one who, even as he ruled absolutely and exercised, liberally, the power of life and death, probably always felt the outcasst about whom he wrote a moving poem.' (Nicholas Fortune THE HERALD )

'On practically every page of Young Stalin, there is a reason to smile with satisfaction at the thrust of revelation and often a reason to gasp or even chuckle. The overall impression is of Carlylean energy with the prose torrenting along. (Montefiore) dazzles. As quasi-academic populist biography goes, this is as good as it gets' (Christopher Silvester THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )

The author cannot be faulted for industry. With help from Russians and Georgians, he has dug up a pile of new information. An attractive book what a complex monster. (THE ECONOMIST )

'Important and fascinating' (Sebastian Shakespeare TATLER )

Following his extraordinary 2004 Stalin biog, the brilliant Montefiore tackles the dictator's youth in Young Stalin (GQ )

an engrossing popular history.. while magnificently entertaining, it reveals the complexity of historical conditions that forge revolutions and their leader.' (Carol Rumens THE INDEPENDENT )

'Magnificent! A masterpiece of detail. Montefiore has unearthed documents long lost in Georgian archives, found the descendants of Soso's friends and produced a vivid psychological portrait of this dangerous, alluring, enigmatic man who like Macacity could vanish from the scenes of the outrages he masterminded. This book moves with pace and authority.' (Michael Binyon THE TIMES )

'A rare treat. A book that commands and deserves our attention. It also succeeds triumphantly in cleaning away much of the grime from the portrait of a man who is no longer an icon of our movement. It is a book of exceptional scholarship ...... written in a gripping and elegant style that combines a novelists flair with a level of reasoned sustained and unsensational argument that is often demanded of, but seldom realised by, top flight academic historians.' (Dr John Callow THE MORNING STAR )

Montefiore's brilliantly researched and readable portrait gives us Stalin with a Mauser in his belt, Stalin the rabblerouser, bankrobber and Marxist conspirator, Stalin the tireless scholar. The picture that emerges is more colourful, more chilling and above all more credible Anyone who wants to understand the shaping of one of historys bloodiest dictators must read this original and thought-provoking book (Catherine Merridale THE GUARDIAN )

'The intellectuals beach read this summer, a groundbreaking work of thrilling energy and scholastic thoroughness that has turned up a wealth of new material on the early sexual, political and criminal career of Josef Stalin.' (Elizabeth Grice THE DAILY TELEGRAPH )

'A thrilling account not just of the man but the highly-charged history from which he emerged. Montefiore brings his own superbly novelistic flair to this prequel to his bestselling Stalin biography.' (Clare Alfree METRO )

'A gripping but dark Boys Own adventure, packed with bombs, violence and treachery. Full of fascinating nuggets' (THE FINANCIAL TIMES )

'Stalin's story is told with great verve and freshness by Mr Montefiore. It provides real insight into this poisonous personality and will be hard for any other author to surpass' (Simon Heffer COUNTRY LIFE )

'this excellent book.' (Roger Lewis THE DAILY EXPRESS )

'Montefiore has found an extraordinary amount of new material that gives human colour to his narrative and he writes with unusual zest. (Paul Anderson TRIBUNE )

'a fascinating book and an absorbing read that throws real light on the formation of a dictator.' (Carla King THE IRISH TIMES )

'A mass of contradictions he (Stalin) is brought to life in this superb biography.' (Martin McCauley HISTORY TODAY )

'A portrait that defies the cliched image of the megalomaniacal Georgian peasant' (DAILY TELEGRAPH (audiobook review) )

'Doggedly researched and compelling biography of the poet and ladies man who became a monster.' (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )

'Exuberant study of a monster in the making.' (THE SUNDAY TIMES )

'Full of the most amazing new information about the early years of the monster.' (THE EVENING STANDARD )

[This] substantial book shines a stark light into the murky underworld of Stalin's revoluntary apprenticeship.' (THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE )

Donald Rayfield, LITERARY REVIEW
'it is hard to imagine how this account can be improved on. Moreover, the narrative flows with insight and humour: YOUNG STALIN is a prequel that outshines even the COURT OF THE RED TSAR.'

Customer Reviews

Portrait of the monster as a young man
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 and bombings (including one in Tbilissi in 1907 that left dozens of bystanders dead). Once in power, he behaved like a gangster, exterminating his opponents and 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 virtually 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 and 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 and 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 and 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 small 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 and 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 and send them to the firing squad.

The making of Russia's future master
It is well known that Trotsky for a long time fatally underestimated Stalin, whom he thought colourless and 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 and efficient. This book documents Stalin's early career in great detail. It shows the charisma, leadership qualities, toughness and ambition that he had displayed from his schooldays onwards; how he was hardened by the brutality of his drunken father and by the violent nature of Georgian society; what a genius he had for organizing strikes, the burning of oil refineries, murderous bank raids and piracy, protection rackets and 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 all bore his stamp. Stalin frequently used disguises and aliases, and several times escaped from prison or from exile.

The frequent inefficiencies of the Okhrana and 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 all 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 and 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 calls Stalin's followers gangsters, and some of them indeed were no more than that: Stalin certainly made use of the criminal underworld. But he himself and 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 and 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 challenge (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, and 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 and indeed turned down forty-seven of articles Lenin sent in!) But then he was sent into exile, and 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 fallen, and the Kerensky's government ordered their release, March 1917, and Stalin returned to Petrograd.

Claiming seniority, he resumed the editorship of Pravda and 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 and other leaders were imprisoned; Lenin and 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; and then began the struggle inside the Bolshevik Party between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin on the one hand who now wanted an immediate uprising, and `the Waverers', Kamenev and Zinoviev on the other who thought it too dangerous. But Lenin had his way, and 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. Tragically, the real Revolution, pitiless and bloody, started the moment this comedy ended.'

Forget what you thought you knew about Stalin


A truly amazing book and 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.