[lbo-talk] Book Recommendation: The Young Stalin

[Chris Doss]

I picked up S.S. Montefiore's new book on Stalin's
youth, "The Young Stalin," this afternoon. It is
really friggin' interesting. Montefiore has gone
through piles and piles of memoirs written by people
who knew Stalin in his youth, including -- get this --
he located Stalin's mother's memoirs, written at the
age of 80, which he found gathering dust in the
Georgian CP archives. They're all about dealing with
her alcoholic husband and raising Soso. She really
beat the crap out of him, though I doubt that child
abuse was terribly uncommon in Georgia in the 1880s.

Also, the descriptions of Georgia of that time period
are great. I had known that Stalin came from a
background of pervasive violence, but hadn't realized
just how intense it was.

Also, the material on his budding literary career is
fascinating. Stalin was known as a poet in Georgia
before he was known as a revolutionary and bank
robber. Really, that Trotsky-derived image of Stalin
as a grey philistine has got to be dropped. He was not
that way at all, and the description says more about
Trotsky than about Stalin IMO.

Anyway, this is a great book. Anybody interested in
Soviet history, read it!

       
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