This book gave me back my faith in the art of biography, that something new can be found about even the most heavily referenced figures. Although I've read many Stalin biographies, in most of them the Vozhd's early years failed to come into focus. We learned little about the family other than papa Beso's drunken brutality and about mama Keke's resourcefulness and pride.
Yet, even in this most studied of lives, there is plenty of gold to be found by those who know where to look. Montefiore takes us back to the almost Mediterranean splendor of the Caucasus, a land of fierce feuds and vendette, of revolutionary nobles and passionate women, where everything (the weather, the clothing, the food, the tempers) is as un-Russian as can be. Stalin was definitely a Caucasian. He was proud and violent, but also very sharp and able to behave with unexpected generosity. He was extremely bright and amazingly well read. It is easy to see why Stalin was offended by the poet Mandelstam's celebrated line in his "Ode to Stalin", about "His fat fingers" "slimy like slugs". Stalin surely regarded himself as an intellectual and this description as a dim-witted vulgarian could only wound him deeply. In his pictures as a young man he is curiously good looking, and one can imagine the attraction this bright young rebel might have had for all sorts of women. In this Stalin was very unlike Hitler, for whom fleshly pleasures were repellent, and rather like Mussolini who was to the end a ladies' man.
Stalin's friends come alive in this book. Sure, they felt no compunction about cutting an enemy's throat, or blowing up an oil refinery, or bombing a police station, but they were also able to have fun, to drink, to joke, perhaps like many rebels of our day. It is to me a mistery how such a fanatic as Stalin, whose faith in revolutionary communism was boundless, could also enjoy all sorts of social and physical pleasures. Perhaps the explanation might be in his mother's example. Keke Geladze, as religious a woman as ever lived, was not above drinking or taking up lovers.
Stalin's environment also becomes completely understandable. Georgia was also much like the American far West, a violent borderland where strong men imposed their will on others and insults where washed away in blood. Many Georgian notables supported the rebels not because they sympathised with socialism but because they saw them as nationalists fighting against the Russian invaders. It is a tragedy that Stalin ordered the murder of so many of his former backers, and that he came, in time, to be even more Russian than the Tsar ever was. Far from being a social outsider, in Georgia Stalin was known to everyone in his hometown, and he was very close to the local nobility, magnates, clergy, intellectuals and criminals. Stalin was uniquely Georgian, which might explain to some extent his current popularity there.
These are just a few of the surprises this book has in store. It includes several surprisingly good poems by Stalin as a young man. It is a pity that in later years he would dedicate himself to writing leaden treatises on subjects such as linguistics, when in fact he was a light, luminous poet. It has some wonderful pictures of a few of the Vozhd's girlfriends, and they are also surprisingly good looking. But its greatest triumph is that it shows how Josif-Soso-Koba-Ivanovitch became Stalin. You take a boy of many gifts (bright, curious, brave, strong) and with a few but very great defects (proud, spiteful, fanatical) and subject him to violence and brutality during his early years, then allow him to develop his intellect while leaving his morality stunted, place him in an environment where he might become a negative leader without being punished for it, add in social ferment and revolution in the air, and then a mighty conflagration. The boy is father to the man. Stalin was not a wolf or a beast in human shape, as many said, he was just that same boy Soso, but now inmeasurably powerful, and with history on his side. The son of a cobbler and a washing woman ended up as one of the two most powerful men in the world.
Stalin's enemies dismissed him as "the man who missed the Revolution", "a grey blur", a nonentity who sidelined Lenin's true heirs through bureaucratic wiles. But although he was a terrorist and a sociopath since youth, Stalin was no "grey blur": he was one of the most fascinating personalities yet encountered, a colourful bundle of contradictions, intellectual and man of action, womanizer and ascetic, political fanatic and cynical pragmatist. Far from having usurped a role reserved to other revolutionaries such as Trotski or Bukharin, Stalin was Lenin's true heir, which is not meant to be a praise. Lenin admired Stalin precisely because of his ruthlesness and obduracy rather than in spite of them. One doesn't need to be sympathetic to Stalin or to Communism to enjoy this, a brilliant book, with enormous cinematic potential. It begs to be made into a movie.
