Something else I'm learning that I didn't know about is the phenomenal number of illegitimate children that Stalin fathered (and abandoned). Maybe it was a macho Georgian "wham bam thank-you maam" thing; they have that reputation.
(It's maybe interesting that Stalin's being abused as a child did not translate into him becoming a wife- and childbeater himself -- although he treated his son Yakov like shit, I don't think he ever touched him or any of the other children, or either wife. He did slap Svetlana on the face once, but that was an extreme circumstance -- she was a teenager having an affair with a man in his 40s.)
I'm up to the year 1905 in Montefiore. Oh Trotsky, you shameless fibber you. Stalin did not "spend 1905 in an unpretentious office writing dull comments on brilliant events"; he spent 1905 on the blood-soaked streets of Tiflis and Baku (where 2000 people were killed in one of those anti-Armenian pogroms that seem to plague Azerbaijan), heading a Battle Squad, engaging in firefights with Black Hundreds and Cossacks, running protection rackets, and assassinating people. For shame, Lev Davidovich! :)
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