BOOK REVIEW Beyond the statue's cold frown Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Reviewed by Fraser Newham
In 1907, and at the age of 22, Joseph Stalin's young wife Kato died by some
account of tuberculosis, by others of typhus. The couple had been married for
just over a year and the young revolutionary took it badly, to the extent that
his comrades were forced to take away his Mauser.
Stalin blamed himself; at the funeral, even as the secret police closed in, the
man who through persecution alone would kill 4 million of his countrymen during
three decades of paranoid and forceful rule, hurled himself into her grave
along with her coffin, struggling with the menfolk as they attempted to pull
him out. "My
personal life is shattered," he told friends. "Nothing attaches me to life -
except socialism."
Perhaps the death of Kato - a Japanese name, an affectation which the middle
class Georgian girl shared with her two sisters - did really extinguish
something in the young Soso, to use the name by which Simon Sebag Montefiore
refers to him for a large part of this admirably researched biography of the
future dictator's younger years. Or perhaps not - even as an old man Stalin
could be sentimental, speaking fondly of old friends long since dispatched
sometimes with a stroke of his own pen.
Stalin was born in Georgian town of Gori in 1878 in conditions of some poverty.
Through the efforts of a feisty mother he was enrolled in the local church
school, later graduating to the seminary in the regional center of Tiflis.
As a teenager he already flirted with radical politics and he joined the
incipient revolutionaries (the SDs) in 1898. In the bandit country of the
Caucasus he was to develop a profile as a gangster chief and bankroller of
Lenin’s cause; surviving lengthy periods of exile he continued to rise within
the party apparatus and, as Montefiore tells it, emerged as one of the key
figures in the revolution of 1917.
All in all it is quite a tale - and one which casts new light on a man whose
name is a byword for ruthless and dictatorial government, and whose future path
looms over the telling like the shadow of a Sith Lord. In particular, Stalin’s
Asian roots have never been so evident - for as we see in many ways his
background has more in common with the tribal chiefs of the Chechen rebellion
than the current crop of Muscovite ruling elite. Montefiore describes Tiflis,
where Stalin studied for the priesthood:
Water carriers,
street-traders, pick pockets and porters delivered to or stole from the
Armenian and Persian Bazaars, the alleyways of which more resembled a Levantine
souk than a European city ... Caravans of camels and donkeys, loaded with silks
and spices from Persia and Turkestan ... ambled through the gates of the
Carvanserai.
We remember that Tikrit in Iraq, birthplace of
Saddam Hussein, was a mere 1,100 kilometers miles away - is this one reason why
Saddam always expressed such admiration for Stalin's methods?
Interesting, too, is the importance which Montefiore allows young Soso in the
Russian Revolution. In many accounts Stalin has been presented as an also-ran
in these early stages, a crude, corrupting figure on the criminal margins of
the great cause who, after Lenin's death, would highjack the revolution and
lead it away from the noble principles of its founder.
Not here. Montefiore emphasizes Stalin's closeness to Lenin from early on - it
is the Georgian who founds the communist newspaper Pravda; through his writings
on minority issues he lays the intellectual foundations for the multination
socialist empire the Soviet Union will become; and, for a period in 1917, in
Lenin's absence he serves in Petrograd as the senior Bolshevik on the ground.
We also discover that Stalin was a poet of considerable talent - a personality
trait among the genocidal perhaps familiar to students of Hitler and Mao.
Montefiore digs up a professor from the University of London who asserts Stalin
might just have made it as a poet if the thrill of revolution had not led him
down a rockier path. (For his own part, Stalin asserted he didn't have the
patience for a career as a poet. "It requires one's whole attention - a hell of
lot of patience," the dictator later told an acquaintance. "And in those days I
was like quicksilver.")
If the traditional view of Stalin glosses over his political diligence or
poetic accomplishments then that is in part the fault of Trotsky and his
various writings on the topic. But as Stalin's ideological enemy and the loser
in the power struggle which followed Lenin's death, he had his own agenda. The
antipathy of course was mutual: famously Stalin had his decades-long enemy
dispatched in Mexico City in 1940 with the not-so-poetic application of an ice
axe to the brain.
Stalin and Trotsky fall out early on, and in general Montefiore nicely brings
out the patterns and vagaries of life as a young revolutionary. Particularly
memorable are his descriptions of those long periods of exile many of them
experienced from time to time, shipped upriver to the far west where it was
hoped they could cause less trouble.
Conditions in these exile settlements were incredibly lax; decades later aging
revolutionaries would reminisce about their times in the distant wilds, days
spent reading, drinking and, far from family and moral restraints, engaged in
more than a little sex. There were no fences or walls around these villages,
and "escape" was all part of the game - at one point, in preparation for one
such walk out, Stalin even wrote back to his mum in Georgia asking if she could
send him some extra clothes.
He was exiled on at least four separate occasions; this included in the years
leading up to 1917 a four-year banishment to one of the wildest corners of
Siberia, inhabited largely nomadic Tungus tribesmen. Stalin took local clothes,
travelled by sled and, like the locals, lived on a diet of fish and reindeer.
It was an experience which he later claimed as formative, central to his steely
being.
"He became the solitary hunter," Montefiore tells us, "a role that suited his
self-image as a man on a sacred mission, riding out into the snows with a rifle
for company, but no attachments except his faith ... For the rest of his life
he regaled Politburo grandees with tales of his Siberian adventures. Even when
he ruled Russia he was still that solitary hunter."
Montefiore has a nice turn of phrase, and powerful ability to evoke place -
though just once or twice he seems to allow his desire to tell a good story to
get away from him, when it all seems just a touch too good to be true. Okhrana
agents are recast as "lavishly rewarded bon viveurs"; one of Stalin's teenage
girlfriends is christened "Glamourpuss"; or his future mother-in-law Olga
Alliluyev described as a "highly sexed Marxist temptress". There are moments
when one wonders if the revolutionary life was just a little more squalid than
all this implies.
But this is a small concern. Montefiore has pulled off a considerable
achievement here; from the taverns of the Caucasus, to the Siberian snows, to
the opera houses of St Petersburg on the eve of the revolution he injects his
various worlds with interest and glamour. At the same time he has added depth
and context to a dominant 20th century figure; behind the statue’s cold frown
lay a surprisingly exotic past.
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, May
2007. ISBN: 13: 978-0297850687. Price US$50.00, 397 pages.
Fraser Newham is a widely published freelance journalist and a director
of InboxEducation.com.
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Stalin was born in Georgian town of Gori in 1878 in conditions of some poverty.
Through the efforts of a feisty mother he was enrolled in the local church
school, later graduating to the seminary in the regional center of Tiflis.
