Latest Read: Young Stalin

Just for the record: I'm not a Stalinist.  In fact, the man disgusts me.  But I was interested - how does a man get to become an evil dictator and kill millions?  Turns out, Stalin's early life (when he was better known as Joseph Djugashvili) has a pretty direct connection.  He wasn't killing millions, but he was living in what amounts to a Wild West frontier environment where trust was in short supply and shootouts part of life.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of the book under review, Young Stalin, does a fantastic job of tracing Stalin's family background and early life leading up to the Bolshevik take over of Russia in 1917.  In fact, this might be one of my favorite non-fiction books of the last few years.  The pacing is great, the lives of the people are presented in vivid detail, and the author knows how to turn a phrase.

Stalin started out life inauspiciously enough born into a poor Georgian family.  His father was a cobbler, but more importantly, a drinker.  In and out of Stalin's life for some time, finally he was out permanently and the mother was left to find a way to raise the child.  Ironically enough, Stalin was sent to the local Orthodox school where he became top of his class.  His academic potential earned him the financial support necessary to move on to higher education (and out of his home town).  But at university, his propensities towards rebellion clashed with the dictatorial power of church education in tsarist Russia and he fell in league with other misfits from the school, eventually joining Lenin's growing ranks.

Tsarist Russia was a shambles of corruption and ineptitude, but the secret police managed to inspire distrust and betrayal within the small bands of Leninists around the nation.  Stalin's claim to fame came through a bank heist he orchestrated and his first meeting with Lenin came about when he delivered the goods to Lenin's headquarters in exile.

Stalin's other formative experience was in exile.  Stalin's frequent arrests and exiles (and escapes) were really times of rest and plotting with and against comrades.  His one period of prolonged and straining exile hardened Stalin, rather than breaking him.

Basically, fearless reader, his formative experiences seemed to have been life in the "Wild West" atmosphere of Georgia; intellectual rigor and challenge at school and in private reading; his experiences in conspiracy theory within the fractured and infiltrated Party; and his life in exile.  Montefiore seems to single out what he calls the conspiratia as the ethos that molded Stalin into the man who would kill millions of people that he saw as threats to his regime.

I was left with a few questions on the applicable lessons to the revolution in the United States.  For instance, why did the wildness of Georgia lead to a multiplicity of political groups and ideas being batted around, whereas the United States' West was wild, but not particularly political in the same way?  I'm guessing it has to do with an American hegemony that did not allow room for the ideological debate; and decentralized power, which made revolution less obviously necessary.