Young Stalin

"This is an extensive picture of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik at the tougher prison-going end of the spectrum, far removed from the leafiness implicit in the pictures of Lenin and Krupskaya in exile in Switzerland. It is a much harder experience that Stalin goes through. You can see in the young Stalin considerable signals that he is a very strange man of certain twitches, but a man of great charisma. I suppose the question that Sebag Montefiore doesn’t ask is whether Stalin’s imprisonments made him worse than he would have been otherwise. Stalin was a great bank robber, the Butch Cassidy of the Bolsheviks. He was not a hugely advanced thinker but he definitely had a sense of what was wrong with his time and place. As with Gorky, it was the behaviour of men towards women, in particular his own father, feckless and wife-beating, that made him support the Revolution. But you’ve got the unjust father, the unjust grandfather and, on top of that heap, lies the Tsar. This gives Stalin the motivation he needs. The Cold War biographies couldn’t afford to say that Stalin was somehow attractive, that Lenin was somehow magnetic, but they were, because otherwise people wouldn’t have followed them. Stalin was never short of women willing to help him, particularly in exile and imprisonment. This book is an important piece of work because it addresses Stalin with the Cold War colder still, but the ideology has lost its sting and can show a Stalin we can believe in – a child of working-class parents, a seminarian monster."