Books

Stalin: The Prequel

In more ways than one, he was a party animal.

By Crawford Kilian, 15 Apr 2008, TheTyee.ca

Josef Stalin

Stalin (still dead).

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  • Young Stalin
  • Simon Sebag Montefiore
  • McArthur & Company (2007)

In World War II he was Uncle Joe, our beloved ally against Nazism. Then he was the face of the Red Menace, and for decades after his death in 1953 he seemed to rule the Soviet Union. Khrushchev's 1956 speech discredited Stalin, but was itself pure Stalinism: advance yourself by destroying your onetime comrade.

One hundred and thirty years after his birth, Josef Stalin remains a present force. Saddam Hussein modelled his regime on Stalin's. Countless Russians still admire him and look back on his era as a golden age.

So his life deserves study -- for what he did to create our world, and for what he tells us about ourselves. Stalin was not a monster. He was a man capable of monstrosities, and capable of making others commit monstrosities as well. He was not the last of his kind.

The hero of a family saga

Simon Sebag Montefiore published Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar in 2004. It's a fascinating account of Stalin in power, ruling and ruining the Soviet Union. Drawing on newly opened Russian archives, Montefiore found remarkably detailed and personal records, many by Stalin's own victims. The result was a page-turner of a family saga, complete with suicidal wives, drunken sons, and priapic psychopaths.

Now he's used the same techniques in the forgotten archives of Georgia and the other new Caucasian republics. His friends and associates left memoirs of the young Soso Djugashvili they'd known in the two turbulent decades around the turn of the 20th century. In Young Stalin, we again have an account that is exciting, suspenseful, and finally unsatisfying.

With such material, the excitement comes easily. Montefiore starts with a famous 1907 bank robbery in Tiflis (modern Tbilisi). Stalin had organized it brilliantly, using revolutionaries, gangster, pistol-packing teenage girls, and street urchins. The heist gained hundreds of thousands of rubles, cost 40 lives, and made headlines across Europe.

More importantly, it helped fund the revolutionary activities of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the exiled leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democrat party. So did other robberies (some of ships on the Black Sea) that Stalin planned.

Montefiore does a brilliant job of creating the context for this young brigand: a grim childhood in a primitive Caucasian town where drunken brawls were the chief form of entertainment. His father was a drunk. After losing two sons, his mother was overprotective of the one who lived.

Growing up tough and intelligent

Young Soso grew up both tough and intelligent. Though he was not the son of a priest, his mother wangled him a place in a seminary where he could get the best possible education. He was a brilliant student, and a promising poet whose first works won prompt publication. But he soon learned contempt for his clerical teachers, and for the social order they helped uphold. He read forbidden authors like Zola, broke the rules, and still quit under his own terms.

Marx gave him a political philosophy, but he despised the would-be radicals who talked but did nothing. Lenin's famous pamphlet, What is to be done?, gave Soso both an agenda and a leader.

But he still had time to carouse. The early Reds were party animals in more ways than one. Women liked his looks, his wit, and his literary talent. Men liked his toughness, his magnetism, and his ability to drink. Yet he could abandon his girlfriends (and his children), and reward or punish his old friends almost at whim.

Montefiore shows us a young man both self-absorbed yet acutely perceptive of other people's characters. His frequent spells in jail were mere study breaks, and he always became the de facto boss of prisoners and guards alike.

Adapted to chaotic times

Given the tenor of the times, Soso was superbly adapted. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Russian Empire staggered from one defeat to another. Sensing the government's weakness, criminals and revolutionaries alike ran wild. The Caucasus in 1905 sounds amazingly like Iraq in 1955 or 2005: a violent world of tribal hostility, bottomless corruption, huge oil wealth, pogroms, and spasms of brutal repression. No wonder Saddam Hussein emulated Stalin.

Konspiratsia was the only way for revolutionaries to survive, but the Tsar's Okhrana was equally brilliant at it. While the secret police picked off Stalin's comrades, and then Stalin himself, the Reds killed their own loyal comrades but trusted the turncoats. Discovering this only made the Reds even more paranoid.

Exiled to Siberia, Stalin escaped more than once; he attended party meetings in Western Europe, including one in London just weeks before the Tiflis bank robbery.

But he spent most of World War I deep in Siberia, where escape was impossible and survival itself was difficult. Yet his comrades and friends sent him money and warm clothes, he shacked up with a teenager, and local tribesmen taught him how to hunt and fish. He returned to Petrograd a tougher and more competent revolutionary than ever.

The revolution that almost failed

The book's narrative of the two-stage Russian Revolution is suspenseful and surprising. The Bolsheviks' coup was a near-run thing, and could have failed. Its success was largely thanks to Stalin's unswerving loyalty to Lenin and willingness to work hard and ruthlessly.

Montefiore makes those months in 1917 almost painfully vivid. Raging at his gentler comrades in the moment of victory, Lenin snarled: "What's the point of a revolution if you can't shoot people?"

So Young Stalin is very much worth reading, and a fine prequel to Montefiore's earlier biography. But in one crucial aspect, both books fail.

They persuade us that Josef Stalin was that rarity, a genuinely intellectual tyrant. Ideas mattered to him. In exile, he hungered for books more than for warm clothes. He loved and respected literature. As one of his victims observed, Stalin's Russia took poetry so seriously you could get killed for writing it.

Yet Montefiore's books pay almost no attention to the ideas that inspired Stalin to launch into a career that would kill tens of millions.

What made revolution look good?

Yes, Tsarist Russia was an awful place, and the advanced industrial nations weren't much better. We've forgotten that before the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism had a century-long problem: It could market almost anything except itself.

But what made Stalin, Lenin, and millions of ordinary people think that Marxism would be any better? Why did its awful jargon resonate in the hearts and minds of German steelworkers and Chinese peasants and Hollywood screenwriters?

Whatever the reason, in 30 years Marxism swept from Petrograd to Beijing to Berlin and Belgrade -- far faster than Islam moved from Mecca to India and the Pyrenees. Its geographical success lent credence to its ideas. In name, at least, Marxism still governs well over a billion people.

Montefiore has a Chekhovian brilliance in showing us the difficult son of a difficult mother: "You should have become a priest," she told him in the 1930s, when he ruled from the Baltic to the Pacific.

But if we also understood how Stalin's ideas guided his career, we might be prepared to resist the next Stalin -- who may now be preparing himself in some Pakistani madrassa or American university, knowing us well enough to make us commit still more monstrosities for his sake.

[Tyee]

Crawford Kilian is a frequent contributor to The Tyee.

13 Comments:

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  • Skywalker

    4 years ago

    A contradiction in terms

    Stalin was an "intellectual tyrant"? That is hard to accept. Stalin was a murderous bully and his intellectual capacity, if he had any, is always overshadowed by his brutality and complete reliance on total fear and the threat of a slow death one of his slave camps. He was not the Marxist revolutionary at all. He was a tyrant who wanted to be the new czar by another name and he used every bloody scheme he could dream up to get it and hold the population in his grip. The state of the countries in the USSR after the collapse is clear evidence that Stalin was the greatest failure in Russian history. He can even be credited for discrediting Marxism without ever adhering to the principles of Karl Marx. In that sense he has done the struggle for equality more harm than any leader in the last century.

    May he be tormented in hell for all eternity.

  • HowMuchLonger

    4 years ago

    To Skywalker

    The state of the countries you are referring to testifies against your point: Stalin died in 1953, yet there's still enough to steal for everybody.

    Those who leave the ex-USSR, do so by Stalin-designed procedures, from Stalin-built airports in Stalin-developed cities. (I did.)

    Some people aspire to found a transnational corporation. He aspired to world domination. I'd say, 1/6 of the world in 30 years is not too bad.

  • telus employee

    4 years ago

    Killian doesn't have a clue!

    Killian in his review states:
    "But what made Stalin, Lenin, and millions of ordinary people think that Marxism would be any better? Why did its awful jargon resonate in the hearts and minds of German steelworkers and Chinese peasants and Hollywood screenwriters?"

    Killian's ignorance of the difference between Stalinist totalitarianism and Marx's so-called 'Jargon' makes me think that he has probably never read Marx or even understands what Marxism is.

    Marxism is a critique of capitalism and a methodology. All to often so-called educated people like Killian show their ignorance when they conflate the Marxism and Stalinist Russia.

    This is like saying that Nietzsche's works are irrelevant because Hitler was inspired by them.

    Killian also shows his privileged position in society by wondering why Marx's critiques of capitalism resonate with so many people. Killian's privileged life cannot conceive of why anyone would be hostile to capitalism and assumes these millions are simply misled rather than suffering from the excesses of global capital.

    Killian also reveals his ignorance when he states "Marxism still governs well over a billion people." I guess he is referring to "communist" China which is about as communist as Chile under Pinochet. China today is a totalitarian capitalist state not communist.

    Killian has no credibility to even review a book on Stalin with ridiculous claims he has made in this piece.

  • ME2

    4 years ago

    Yes, yet anther Meme

    Well said, telus employee.

    Marxism = Stalinism? That's Fascist propaganda, but even so, it seems stuck in our thinking.

    And so McCarthyism also lives on.

  • Skywalker

    4 years ago

    Marxism an ideal not practiced.

    There is not a single thing Stalin did that justifies the slaughter of civilians through starvation and forced labour that number in the range from 30 to 50 million. The Gulags were not the only option Stalin had but it was the one he chose. In his paranoid egomania he thought so little of human suffering that murder and forced starvation were the only method that appealed to him. I say he failed miserably in every respect. Failed the Marxist ideology, failed communism, but succeeded in Stalinism. That personal "success" is a human failure. So HowMuchLonger the countries that are succeeding have done so by rejected anything related to Stalin. All through Stalin's reign of terror the countries in the USSR were a drab and joyless place filled with fear and insecurity. The difference between East Germany and West Germany really highlighted that contrast.

    The less written about the mass murderer the better

  • Tulip

    4 years ago

    "Jargon"...

    Anyone who dismisses Marx's writing as "jargon", as was pointed out earlier, most certainly has never read Marx and as such in no position to comment.

    Furthermore, anyone who has read Marx will find the links between he and Lenin strained, at best, and between himself Stalin--almost non-existent. Just because someone calls themselves a Marxist, or a socialist or a communist does not make it so.

    If that were the case, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia would be the face of liberalism and democracy. But of course, we all realize that it is a ultra-nationalist, quasi-fascist organization--not a liberal haven. The same applies to communism et al.

  • ME2

    4 years ago

    About "the good old days"

    Without in any way defending Stalin's actions, which are indefensible from our modern perspectives, it is worth noting that his methods were hardly unique for Russia. At the time of the Revolution that country was still in the firm grip of a tyrannical landed, political and religious Aristocracy. The serf was considered to be an animal by all.

    It has always been a difficult task to keep the wide-flung Russian Empire together, and its history is a seemingly endless tale of ethnic cleansings, forced marches in "resettlements", forced famines and so on, as various rulers have tried to unite minorities in pursuit of both self-defense and expansion of the Empire.

    I recall reading in the National Geographic that at the time of the Revolution, There were over 4500 linguistic minorities still extant in the country, each a bitter enemy of the other. The old old saying, "A nation divided against itself cannot stand" finds itself having been proven time and time again.

    The same was true of all North American Natives, who were constantly acquiring or defending territory, taking slaves and so on from each other. The one exception seems to be the Iriquoian Confederacy, a Northeastern group of six tribes, which was formed in common response to the expansionist threat posed by early white settlement.

    These days we tend to sympathise with the aims of cultural groups seeking self-determination, but at the same time refuse to recognise that these desires lie at the base of all racial/ethnic strife common to both "whites" and people of colour.

    So one is forced to ask in the case of forced assimilation such as in Russia : Is it worth submission to assimilation in return for freedom from constant attack from one's neighbours, for freedom from worry about the threat of invasion from other nations - and Russia has a long history of massacres and scorched earth at the hands of invaders?

    Large nations have sufficient food resources ready at hand to prevent starvation when localised scarcities develop, and such scarcities are ever-present for small, self-dependant groups.

    In pre-Tsarist and pre-Communist Russia, peasant death from "a thousand cuts" was an ever-present reality, and I'd be willing to guess that in the end, the results of Stalin's brutality has resulted in a longer life-span and a better life-style for today's peasant. And overall, probably less peasant death, despite the Gulags, etc.

    So, is the security worth it? "Culture" be damned, I say.

  • Skywalker

    4 years ago

    ME2

    That Russia needed a strong leader is not in doubt; that it needed a psychopathic monster is. That was my point. Nothing in todays Russia justified slaughtering off the only hard working farmers and intellectuals who might have provided a solution. The revolution stopped the day the oppression began. Then it was just about how much power and priviledge can I get for myself (ie. Stalin)

  • ME2

    4 years ago

    Skywalker

    I grant you your points Skywalker. I certainly do not know enough history to argue with you or anyone else whether a more moderate person could or would have done it differently.

    What I do know, though, is that even today's experience shows that ethnic passions seem to drive almost all the peoples of the Balkans, for instance, and that if these passions were given their head, overnight the whole area would split up into a thousand tiny principalities.

    The other thing I know for sure is that all the Russian history I've learned to date has passed through the anti-Communist, anti-Russian filters of Western thought, and that the more I learn about that process, the more I realise that I shouldn't trust a word that's come out of it.

    But yes, Stalin created much misery for the Russian people, and yes, very likely he was a megalomaniac, but he was/is hardly unique in that condition among leaders past and present.

    What do you think of Bush?

  • Tulip

    4 years ago

    "Strong leaders"...

    It is worth noting that while Lenin was shipped into Russia a board a bullet proof train in the dead of night provided by the Germans to inspire Revolution in Russia, Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist, sailed into St. Petersburg, on his own volition, only to be greeted by 60,000 jubilant supporters.

    In short, the idea that Russia needed "strong leadership" is little more than another bourgeoisie myth. What the Russians needed was vision--and they had plenty of that. In the subsequent struggle, an unfortunate variety of visions prevailed but it was in no way certain, or a given outcome.

    It is worth, alongside Kropotkin's sway, also citing the activities of Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine--wherein this anarchist and his supporters were able to hold off both the Whites and the Trotsky's Red Army for years, as the former sought to crush vision and the latter to betray it.

  • Glen Murtz

    4 years ago

    Shame on this "Educator".

    You know what I love?

    I love people who fail to acknowledge that NOT doing anything when it could be done is as bad as doing it.

    Western democracies have consistently turned tail on say, dead and dying Burmese monks or played nice with apartheid regimes... and on and on and on...

    Some day the "complicit bystander" will be rightly revealed as monstorous as those whose actions have taken lives.

    This "authors" comments demonstrate just how disgustingly blind one can be to such a phenomenon...

    Sickening.

  • Skywalker

    4 years ago

    Tulip and ME2

    I hope you didn't intend to elevate Nestor Mahkno to some status as a "strong leader". He was hardly that unless killing and raping innocents has become the standard for strong leadership. He was just another opportunistic thug or war lord who prevailed for a time when the country was in a civil war and the law was what you could enforce yourself. Look at http://www.mph.org/hp/books/NestorMakhno.htm for a small glimpse into his activities.

    The great tragedy of the entire revolution is that the leaders had absolutely no idea or capacity to run the country. It was revenge and greed motivated and bathed in blood. The killed off any person with the intelligence to assist them, killed off any person who had shown initiative and as a result the revolution failed miserably.

    I see some comparisons to Bush as his "rule" also has victims even if not to the same degree. When the tally comes in he too will have blood on his hands. But against Stalin he is a piker.

  • ME2

    4 years ago

    Glen Murtz

    But you avoid my central point, Glen. You write:

    "I love people who fail to acknowledge that NOT doing anything when it could be done is as bad as doing it."

    Perhaps your "complicit bystander" might be someone who allows people to come under the spell of demagogues who then break up a larger, relatively peaceful group of people into a series of smaller groups which are fuelled by mutual hatreds.

    But then, I suppose the killing of ten people in each of ten situations can be forgiven while the killing of 100 people in one situation cannot.

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