[lbo-talk] Book Recommendation: The Young Stalin

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 7 10:58:28 PDT 2007


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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