Joanna
Chris Doss wrote:
>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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