Why I Read This Book
There are several reasons why this
book caught my eye.
To begin
with, in general terms early modern Europe is one of my pet historical
interests, and this book (1878-1917) falls within that category.
More
specifically, however, I’ve always wanted to learn more about Stalin’s career
as a young revolutionary.
The
Trotskyist version of history is that Stalin was not an ideologue, but a power
hungry opportunist who destroyed the revolution for the sake of his own
personal gain.
Even if you’re
not a Trotskyist (and I myself tend to agree with Chomsky’s critique
of Lenin and Trotsky—LINK HERE), it still seems to be widely
accepted that although Lenin may have been brutal and ruthless, he was brutal
and ruthless for ideological reasons, while Stalin was just a power-hungry
dictator masquerading as an ideologue.
But
political opportunists rarely side with the underdogs. It makes sense that political opportunists
would come out of the woodwork after the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917,
but Stalin had joined the party way back in 1903, when it was not
seen as a promising political career for an ambitious young man. If Stalin was never a true believer in
communism, if he was just a political opportunist all along, then why didn’t he
follow the more traditional paths for young men seeking political power?
Although I
didn’t know the details of Stalin’s biography, I had known that in the years leading
up to 1917 Stalin, like most of the Bolshevik leaders, had spent years working
in the underground, constantly on the run from Tsarist police, and that he had
also spent much time in prison and in Siberian exile. That sounds more like the career of a
dedicated ideologue than a political opportunist to me.
But then,
if Stalin had suffered so much for communism, why did he then destroy it when
he came into power? If he was so
dedicated to the Bolshevik cause, why did he destroy the Bolshevik party by
systematically executing all the old Bolshevik leaders during the Great Terror
of the 1930s?
Of course
it could just be that Stalin abandoned his ideals once he got into power. He would certainly not be the only
former-revolutionary-turned-dictator to do so. Nor is this a phenomenon unique
to socialism, as the careers of republican-revolutionaries-turned-tyrant like
Oliver Cromwell and Robespierre demonstrate. But I rarely hear Stalin’s life described as
an idealist gone bad. He’s usually
regarded, in the Trotskyist tradition, as having been a bad apple all
along. But then, how to account for his
early days?
These
questions had long baffled me, and for that reason I had long been curious to
learn more about the life of the younger, pre-dictator, Stalin. When I saw this book in the bookstore, it
looked like exactly the kind of book I had been searching for all these years.
The final
selling point for me was all the positive reviews this book had gotten. Many
reviewers praised Simon Montefiore’s skills as a historian who can write like a
novelist. Some reviewers compared this
book with Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport, (or rather vice-versa, since Young Stalin was published first--see the New Statesman review HERE) and
having enjoyed Helen Rappaport’s story telling qualities, that was praise enough for me.
Thumbing through
Young Stalin in the bookstore, I
could tell at a glance that much of the book was written in an engaging
story-telling style, and decided it would be an enjoyable read. So I purchased it.
Readability and
Enjoyableness
Simon Sebag Montefiore is indeed a
talented story-teller. I’ll quote a
couple of paragraphs to illustrate his writing:
Here
Montefiore is describing a bank stage-coach robbery carried out by Stalin’s
gang:
The Cossacks galloped into Yerevan Square,
two in front, two behind and another alongside the two carriages. Through the
dust, the gangsters could make out that the stagecoach contained two men in
frockcoats—the State Bank’s cashier Kurdyumov and accountant Golovnya—and two
soldiers with rifles cocked, while a second phaeton was packed with police and
soldiers. In the thunder of hooves, it took just seconds for the carriages and
horsemen to cross the square ready to turn into Sololaki Street, where stood
the new State Bank: the statues of lions and gods over its door represented the
surging prosperity of Russian capitalism.
Bachu lowered his newspaper, giving
the sign, then tossed it aside, reaching for his weapons. The gangsters drew
out what they nick-named their “apples”—powerful grenades which had been
smuggled into Tiflis by the girls Anneta and Alexandra, hidden inside a big
sofa.
The gunmen and the girls stepped
forward, pulled the fuses and tossed four grenades which exploded under the
carriages with a deafening noise and an internal force that disemboweled horses
and tore men to pieces, spattering the cobbles with innards and blood. The
brigands drew their Mauser and Browning pistols and opened fires on the
Cossacks and police around the square who, caught totally unawares, fell
wounded or ran for cover. More than ten bombs exploded. Witnesses thought they
rained from every direction, even the rooftops: it was later said that Stalin
had thrown the first bomb from the roof of Prince Sumbatov’s mansion. (p.
6-7)
(I know
that’s a little bit confusing because I took those paragraphs out of context,
but you get the idea hopefully.)
Seems like
it should be a really interesting book to read, right?
However, in
spite of how well the book is written, I’ve got to admit I had a hard time getting
through it.
In theory,
the story of a revolutionary seems like it should
be interesting reading: the stunning exploits of revolutionary bravado, a life
constantly on the run, the cat and mouse games with the police, the
cloak-and-dagger spy world, et cetera.
Despite all
these elements, however, the book started to bore me halfway through. The endless cycles of running from the
police, being arrested, escaping, and running from the police again all started
to get repetitive.
The detail
of this book is surprising. I had
thought that Stalin’s early life would be mostly undocumented because of the
secret nature of the revolutionary conspiracy, but it turns out this is not the
case at all. From a variety of sources
(including newly opened archives) Simon Sebag Montefiore actually knows exactly
where Stalin was and what he was doing for most of his revolutionary
period.
In the end
though, for me personally, it was more detail than I wanted, and I got bored
with the story.
(This may
well be more indicative of my limitations as a reader than any inherent
problems with the book. Take my opinion
with a grain of salt.)
Another
factor is that Stalin, even in his younger days, was not a particularly
pleasant character, and I just found it a bit depressing to spend 394 pages
reading about him. (Again, this may just
be me.)
For that
reason, this book languished half-read on my bookshelf for a long time. I got about 200 pages into it, and then my
reading just kind of tapered off as I got distracted by other books. Eventually, I did come back to the book and
force myself to finish the last 200 pages, but by that time almost a year had
gone by.
For that
reason, as I type these words now, some of the early parts of this book are not
fresh in my memory—perhaps yet another reason why you should take my opinion
with a grain of salt.
Understanding Stalin
Although I picked up this book
hoping to understand Stalin’s psychology more, most of the questions I posed at
the beginning of this review are actually outside the scope of this book.
The author
is primarily interested just in recording Stalin’s early life, not
psycho-analyzing it. As he states in his
introduction: “My approach avoids much of
the psycho-history that has obscured and oversimplified our understanding of
Stalin…. As I hope this book shows, Stalin was formed by much more than a
miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology”
(p.xxxi)
Nonetheless,
there are definitely hints here about how Stalin the dictator was formed. His miserable childhood, with a violent
alcoholic father, seems to have mentally scared him, and perhaps caused him to
lose his ability to empathize with others.
And the
violent street fighting culture of the Caucuses, where Stalin grew up, caused
him to learn to be belligerent.
For
whatever it may or may not be worth, his conversion to Marxism appears to have
been genuine. So it’s impossible to write
him off purely as an opportunist. (Nor
does Simon Sebag Montefiore believe the Trotskyist accusation that Stalin had
been a Tsarist police spy all along.)
Like the
rest of the socialists in Tsarist Russia, Stalin experienced a certain amount
of self-sacrifice for the cause—he gave up a comfortable middle-class lifestyle
for the life of an outlaw. But this
self-sacrifice had a trade-off. None of
the revolutionaries appeared to have given up their ego.
Stalin was
a megalomaniac, but he was in good company.
Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest of the Bolsheviks (and for that matter the
Mensheviks as well) are all portrayed as having huge egos. (During the 1917 Revolution, Trotsky is
described as “speaking almost nightly at the ‘packed-out’ Cirque Moderne, where he was often carried to the stage’ by
the crowd. He was, noted Sukhanov, ‘intoxicated by his popularity’” (p.
332))
Reading
this book, I was reminded of a joke I used to hear back in my activist days,
when I was hanging around the Media Mouse crowd. In reference to the over-bearing personality
type that seems disproportionately attracted to leftist politics, the joke
went: “some of the most dictatorial people you’ll ever meet are anarchists.” Stalin and Lenin, of course, were never anarchists,
but perhaps the same principle applies—the idea that people are sometimes
attracted to leftist politics not purely out of a concern for the world’s
downtrodden, but also as an outlet for their own egos.
Even from
his younger days, Stalin was very overbearing with his fellow
revolutionaries. In exile in Siberia,
Montefiore describes an incident that portrays Stalin already behaving as a
dictator even in 1913.
Soso [Stalin] was assigned to stay in Miroedikha, a hamlet to the south where he soon
made himself felt. An exile name Innokenti Dubrovinksy had drowned in the river
that summer, leaving an impressive library. Exile etiquette decreed the sharing
of the libraries of the dead, but typically Stalin ‘expropriated’ the books,
refused to share them and started to read them ravenously. The life of the
exiles rotated around just this sort of petty quarrel which Stalin was so
expert at provoking. The other exiles were outraged—they complained, and
blackballed him. Philip Zakharov, a Bolshevik, confronted the book-thief, but
Stalin treated his impertinent visitor ‘like a Tsarist General would receive a
private soldier who had the insolence to appear before him with a request’.
Stalin behaved like the Khoziain, the
Master, long before he was dictator of Russia—indeed he had done so since
childhood (p. 286).
In addition
to the personality defects Stalin had inherited from childhood, there were
other psychological scars he would pick up in the course of his revolutionary
career that would also cause him to be such a ruthless dictator.
One of the
central dramas of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik story is that of Malinovsky,
a Tsarist police spy who so completely infiltrated the Bolshevik leadership
that he utterly fooled both Stalin and Lenin.
Both Stalin and Lenin refused to believe Malinovsky could ever be a
police spy, even when others tried to warn them. (The story of Malinovsky is also told in
Helen Rappaport’s book on Lenin).
The final
revelation that Malinovsky had in fact been a police spy all along made Stalin
even more paranoid than he already was.
Malinovsky’s strongest defenders in the
Party had been Lenin—and Stalin. ‘Lenin must have known,’ Malinovsky said
later, but he was wrong. Lenin would not believe the truth. But he weighed up
the kudos won by Malinovksy in the Duma and his help in defeating (or removing
by arrest) the Conciliators (including Stalin) to conclude, ‘If he is a provocateur, the secret police gained less from it than
our Party did.’
Stalin, paranoia personified, did
not suspect the greatest traitor of his political career. The Malinovsky case
played its role in making him—and his comrades—obsessively paranoid. Malinovsky
entered the Bolshevik consciousness. Like Banquo’s ghost, he haunted Soviet
history. Henceforth, in the Bolshevik world of konspiratsia, nothing was too outlandish. If Malinovsky
could be a traitor, why not the Soviet marshals, why not the entire General Staff,
why not Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and most of the Central Committee, all shot
as spies during the 1930s on Stalin’s orders? (p. 294)
There is
also a hint that the solitude of Stalin’s Siberian exile drove him a little
crazy: “Kureika [where Stalin was
sent] was a freezing hellhole, the sort
of place where a man could believe himself utterly forgotten and even lose his
sanity: its desolate solitude and obligatory self-containment were to remain
with Stalin throughout his life. (p. 291)
If Stalin
hadn’t already come to the conclusion that human life was cheap, he might have
learned it (or had it reinforced) in Siberia:
[T]he tribesmen were accustomed to losing
men on their fishing expeditions. “I remember in spring at high water, thirty
men went out fishing and in the evening when we came back, one was missing,”
Stalin recounted. They casually explained that their companion had ‘remained
out there.’ Stalin was puzzled until one said that ‘He drowned.’ Their
nonchalance perplexed Stalin, but they explained: ‘Why should we have pity for
men? We can always make more of them, but a horse, try to make a horse!’ Stalin
used this in a 1935 speech to illustrate the value of human life….(p. 303)
It’s
tempting to use these biographical glimpses of Stalin to explain how the
idealist could become such a monster.
But there’s
another angle as well—unlike the traditional Trotskyist explanations,
Montefiore does not view Stalinism as a perversion of Leninism, but simply as
its natural continuation. As Montefiore
writes: “It is still widely believed that
Stalinism was a distortion of Leninism. But this is contradicted by the fact
that in the months after October [1917] they
were inseparable. Indeed for the next
five years Lenin promoted Stalin wherever possible. Lenin singly-handedly
pushed the Bolsheviks to frenzied bloodletting on orders that have recently
been revealed in the archives….He knew what he was doing with Stalin, even
though he acknowledged that ‘that chef will cook up some spicy dishes’.
Stalinism is not a distortion but a development of Leninism (p.369)
My
Trotskyist friends would strongly disagree with the above statement. (For example as Trotyskyist Mark Steel points out, with typical British understatement, the fact that Stalin had all
of the old Bolsheviks executed during the 1930s might be some indication of an
ideological disagreement at some level SEE MARK STEEL LECTURE HERE).
But if
there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Russian revolution, it’s that every
ideology has their own version of the facts.
So as a non-expert, I’m not going to try and parse through who’s right
and who’s wrong. I’ll just quote some of
the arguments Montefiore uses to support his case.
According
to Montefiore, Stalin was not more hardline than Lenin was. In fact, it was often the reverse. For example, Stalin wanted to conciliate with
the Mensheviks in the Russian Duma (parliament) to Lenin’s fury. Also, “Stalin
felt that Lenin’s insistence on ‘European civil war’ was over the top, talk of ‘dictatorship’
impolitic, and demands for ‘land mobilization’ insensitive to peasant hopes”
(p. 332)
And
elsewhere: When Kamenev and Trotsky
decided they wanted to abolish capital punishment in the army, recalled Stalin
later, Lenin overheard them. ‘What nonsense!’ he barked. ‘How can you have a
revolution without shooting people?’ Lenin meant it. (p. 367)
And: He [Lenin] told another acquaintance: ‘We’re engaged in annihilation. Don’t you
recall what Pisarev said: “Break, beat up everything, beat and destroy!
Everything that’s being broken is rubbish and has no right to life! What
survives is good.”’ Lenin’s handwritten notes demanded the shooting, killing,
hanging of ‘bloodsuckers…spiders…leeches.’ He asked, ‘How can you make a
revolution without firing squads? If we can’t shoot White Guard saboteurs, what
kind of revolution is this? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush!’ He demanded
they ‘find tougher people’. But Stalin
and Trotsky were tough enough. ‘We must put an end once and for all,’ said
Trotsky, ‘to the Papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ (p.
369)
Connections With
Other Books I’ve Read
Tom Brown’s Schooldays gets name-dropped briefly in this book.
From page
53: The boy of sixteen from Gori,
accustomed to the freedom of fighting in the streets or climbing Gorijvari, now
found himself locked for virtually every hour of the day in an institution that
more resembled the most repressive nineteenth-century English public-schools
than a religious academy: the dormitories, the bullying boys, the rife buggery,
the cruel sanctimonious teachers and the hours in the detentions cells made it
a Caucasian version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
I’ve
noticed my British friends will occasionally refer to Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a shorthand to describe a brutal boarding
school experience. (Simon Sebag
Montefiore is British.)
Also Victor Hugo’s 93 apparently had
a big influence on Stalin.
From page
61: Stalin discovered the novels of
Victor Hugo, especially 1793, whose
hero Cimourdain, the revolutionary-priest, would become one of his
prototypes. But Hugo was strictly
forbidden [at the seminary.]….Inspector
Father Germogen caught Stalin with Hugo’s 1793, and ordered that ‘he be punished with a prolonged stay in the
punishment cell’.
Other Notes
* One of the more
humorous parts of this book is the adult Stalin’s relationship with his mother.
During his years as dictator anyone who criticized Stalin would be killed, but
of course he could never liquidate his own mother. So, much to his irritation, she got away with
saying things no one else could, and in her later years irritated Stalin by
publically musing, “I wonder why my son
was not able to share power with Trotsky.” (p. 383)
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky Vs TrotskyistAnd Jon Stewart Class Warfare
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