Simon Sebag Montefiore: In new biography claims Stalin as a young man was both poet and thug, but not gray
For decades historians accepted the portrait of Stalin painted by his rivals. He was, in the words of one political adversary, Nikolai Sukhanov, “a gray blur,” a mediocre party hack who managed, through stealth and intrigue, to wrest the levers of power from the brilliant revolutionaries surrounding him. History, in this case, was written by the losers, notably Leon Trotsky, who never could accept that he had been bested by a pockmarked thug from Georgia with shaky intellectual credentials.
In “Young Stalin,” Simon Sebag Montefiore’s meticulously researched, authoritative biography of Stalin’s early years, the blur comes into sharp focus. Building on the revisionist studies of Robert Service and Richard Overy, Mr. Montefiore offers a detailed picture of Stalin’s childhood and youth, his shadowy career as a revolutionary in Georgia and his critical role during the October Revolution. No one, henceforth, need ever wonder how it was that Stalin found his way into Lenin’s inner circle, or took his place in the ruling troika that assumed power after the storming of the Winter Palace.
Just as he did in “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,” his lurid, grisly chronicle of Stalin in power, Mr. Montefiore has found his devil in the details, working his way with a fine-toothed comb through previously unread archival material in Russia and in Georgia, where he uncovered a memoir written by Stalin’s mother. Throughout, he connects dots and fills in the blanks, uncovering facts that Stalin, once he assumed power, took great pains to conceal.
No detail is too minute. We learn that Stalin, while living in exile in Vologda in 1911, visited the library 17 times in less than two months....
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In “Young Stalin,” Simon Sebag Montefiore’s meticulously researched, authoritative biography of Stalin’s early years, the blur comes into sharp focus. Building on the revisionist studies of Robert Service and Richard Overy, Mr. Montefiore offers a detailed picture of Stalin’s childhood and youth, his shadowy career as a revolutionary in Georgia and his critical role during the October Revolution. No one, henceforth, need ever wonder how it was that Stalin found his way into Lenin’s inner circle, or took his place in the ruling troika that assumed power after the storming of the Winter Palace.
Just as he did in “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,” his lurid, grisly chronicle of Stalin in power, Mr. Montefiore has found his devil in the details, working his way with a fine-toothed comb through previously unread archival material in Russia and in Georgia, where he uncovered a memoir written by Stalin’s mother. Throughout, he connects dots and fills in the blanks, uncovering facts that Stalin, once he assumed power, took great pains to conceal.
No detail is too minute. We learn that Stalin, while living in exile in Vologda in 1911, visited the library 17 times in less than two months....