Little Soso

...Young Stalin is not without its lapses...

...During World War II, he forgave Winston Churchill for his erstwhile anti-Bolshevism, saying, “All that is in the past and the past belongs to God...

...He deadlegged a boy who danced the Georgian lekuri better and nearly drowned another by pushing him into the Kura River...

...When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets...

...The czar used to be known as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and Peter the Great once pounded his chest in defi ance of someone who suggested the appointment of a holy patriarch...

...Zhivago alone for being a “cloud-dweller...

...BY MICHAEL WEISS Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore Knopf, 496 pp., $30 There’s a grim irony in the fact that Joseph Stalin fi rst made a name for himself— even if it was only one of his many pseudonyms—as a poet...

...The italics are mine, but the language is hardly that of a strict materialist...

...W.H...

...Even Stalin admitted his shortcomings once...

...It also succeeds, on the whole...

...Sebag Montefi ore has given us the most detailed and comprehensive portrait of the mass murdering ideologue just as he was getting warmed up...

...Sebag Montefi ore is also quite good at showing how the seminary dropout never really abandoned biblical messianism...

...When this second boy protested that he couldn’t swim, Stalin told him, “Yes, but when you got into trouble, you had to learn to swim...

...Diminutive, sickly, and something of a mama’s boy, he viewed the woman who bore him—as he later did his wives, lovers, friends, and offspring— as eminently dispensable in the pursuit of his own megalomaniacal goals...

...Stalin liquidated countless others in false pursuit of these slippery fi gures, and Sebag Montefi ore is right to conclude: “Here is the origin of the paranoiac Soviet mind-set, the folly of Stalin’s mistrust of the warnings of Hitler’s invasion plans in 1941 and the bloody frenzy of his Terror...

...it was his job to cultivate them as contacts...

...you don’t even notice them...

...By this he meant the consummate praktik, an inconspicuous but effective man of action who could rob banks and blackmail tycoons for a party that had offi cially outlawed criminal adventurism...

...At times, our author seems too easily impressed by a Russian of average learning from the turn of the last century: “[Stalin] knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman...

...At 16, Stalin wrote romantic poems that earned the respect of the celebrated poet Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, who published them in the newspaper Iveria...

...Having thus expertly dealt with the adult years, the historian now sets out to capture the totalitarian in bloom...

...Thus, he did the bulk of the recruitment and was on the receiving, not the giving, end of the intelligence nexus...

...Sebag Montefi ore, like Robert Service before him, aims to correct this interpretation, largely advanced by Trotsky and his followers, by showing that Stalin was actually a “deep thinker” and man of rare gifts...

...Like Abu Musab al Zarqawi, he was a natural leader of the lumpen, semiliterate prison element, and reputation alone drove the success of his Bolshevik Expropriators Club, which procured weapons, facilitated jailbreaks for captured comrades, and executed party turncoats: “Stalin would order the delivery of a letter to a businessman, illustrated with ‘bombs, a lacerated corpse and two crossed daggers,’ then come calling with a Mauser in his belt to collect...

...Much of the controversy has rested on the only offi cial-seeming document that has come to light: the so-called “Eremin Letter,” which appeared in the 1920s and was purportedly written by the colonel of the Tifl is bureau of the Okhrana...

...In trying to portray Stalin as an unheralded brain of Bolshevism, Sebag Montefi ore fails to cite a single utterance or piece of writing that distinguishes his subject for candlepower...

...But the middle cadres supported us, explained our positions to the masses...

...We were little known, I myself, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kalinin, then...

...And if the author occasionally elides one of Bertram Wolfe’s principal injunctions for historical writing—not to fashion a prologue with the end always in mind—then this can be forgiven since Stalin was in many ways a prototype of the adolescent villain...

...That this troglodytic Aesop won himself a small army of early admirers should teach us something about human frailty...

...He deadlegged a boy who danced the Georgian lekuri better and nearly drowned another by pushing him into the Kura River...

...Soso” Djugashvili, born in 1879, was abused by his alcoholic father, and he in turn abused animals and other children...

...We need three things: one—guns, two—guns and three, again and again—guns...

...For one thing, a Christ-like self-conception was necessary for keeping in thrall a people that, for centuries, had thought of its sovereign as a demiurge...

...It inadvertently recalls Voltaire’s observation that, given the whole that would be formed by all the gathered splinters of the cross, surely a giant Christ must have been crucifi ed on it...

...Lenin had taken shape in my imagination as a stately and imposing giant...

...If, like Vladimir Putin, Stalin only used faith as a feint to dupe credulous Western statesmen, then how to explain the terms of his disillusionment upon fi rst encountering the leader of the Bolsheviks...

...Stalin’s contemporaries —not all of whom were ten dentious antagonists— grasped his mediocrity better...

...Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest...

...Noe Jordania, a real Georgian intellectual, told him to study more before presuming to write for the radical newspaper Kvali...

...He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fl eets...

...one has also to add, L’Eglise, c’est moi...

...Moreover, Okhrana agents were typically well compensated and lived lavish lifestyles, whereas Stalin was perennially poor and bedraggled...

...As recounted in Georgy Dimitrov’s diaries, in 1937 Stalin gave a toast at a Comintern dinner, laying credit for his and his cronies’ success at the feet of the Soviet “middle cadres” who choose the leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure the success of our cause...

...Imagine my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary man, below average height, in no way different from ordinary mortals...

...In a sense, then, it’s quite easy to see why Stalinism became the opiate of 20th-century intellectuals: At bottom, the intellectuals envied its murderous, inscrutable fi gurehead, a man capable of doing what they could only rationalize away...

...Stalin seems to have consolidated his terrorist leadership while incarcerated...

...His metaphysical opportunism could cut both ways...

...One of the book’s more iffy objectives is common among today’s revisionists, who argue that against Stalin’s own cult of personality there has been erected a formidable cult of historiography that depicts him as a hapless provincial and intellectual featherweight...

...The letter was likely forged and has never been corroborated by any other czarist record...

...A little learning is a dangerous thing, all right, and one shouldn’t be fooled by the thin integuments of civilization that mask the most lethal barbarism...

...Boris Souvarine, one of Stalin’s earliest biographers and more fl uent in the Marxist idiom for having been the founder of the French Communist party, conceived of the dictator as, primarily, the product of “peasant psychology” and theological instruction...

...Compare this reinforced troika with the methods Nikita Khrushchev claimed, in his 1956 “Secret Speech,” that Stalin prescribed for investigators of the Doctor’s Plot: “Beat, beat, and once again, beat...

...If Stalin was, in fact, an atheist, then it was mainly for show, to prove his mettle as a Marxist...

...In Russia, it has never been enough to proclaim, L’Etat, c’est moi...

...So it’s not quite accurate, although it makes for a more epic narrative, to deem the two archnemeses mirror images of each other...

...It cost Osip Mandelstam his freedom and his sanity to compose these lines in 1934, the year of Sergei Kirov’s murder, which furnished the paranoid rationale for the purging of Old Bolsheviks (“he rolls the executions on his tongue like berries”) and the establishment of a one-man dictatorship in Russia...

...Yet there are three underlying themes that distinguish the present volume as perhaps the best-yet resource on Stalinology...

...True, Stalin may have ordered these destroyed, but Sebag Montefi ore points out that many of the Bolsheviks who charged him with betrayal had their timelines confused...

...Auden had it right in his “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” composed in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact: Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand...

...The state security apparatus also wanted its men at liberty, so how to explain that between 1908 and 1917, Stalin spent a total of 18 months free...

...Most convincing of all is the fact that he never managed to guess the real identities of (nevermind murder) “Fikus” and “Mikheil,” the two spies who had infi ltrated the Baku Bolshevik Party...

...Michael Weiss is the New York editor of Pajamas Media...

...The studious priest-in-training might have smuggled forbidden literature into his bunk at night, but someone who scribbled “ha-ha-ha...

...They don’t try to climb above their station...

...Red Tsar” is how Simon Sebag Montefi ore described Stalin in his previous book exploring the Kremlin mountaineer’s sanctum sanctorum of terrifi ed toadies and sybaritic lieutenants...

...Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomasky were all popular...

...It’s worth noting that Stalin’s rhetorical style also took shape during his larval revolutionary period...

...Given Stalin’s way with spotting secret agents on sight, it’s more than plausible that he knew which imperial authorities (almost all were hopelessly corrupt and greedy) to target for conversion...

...Even as a star pupil of the Gori Church School, young Stalin could brook no rival for attention or physical prowess...

...And yet the mind and character presented in these pages never really rise above the banal, despite the unquestionably extraordinary deeds for which they were responsible...

...It was the poets, after all, who understood him best: But wherever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fi ngers, his words like measures of his weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims...

...We were fi eldworkers in Lenin’s time, his colleagues...

...No doubt there are Philistines with a bit of verbal recall who envy the gem-like fl ame in others without quite knowing how to appreciate it, much less embody it, themselves...

...The mind reels at the fact that the future Five Year Planner once toiled for a Rothschild oil concern in Batumi...

...Leaves fall from the trees in autumn—but fresh ones grow in the spring...

...This is why Stalin didn’t sound so foolish to claim, “The working-class gave birth to me and raised me in its own image and likeness...

...next to Tolstoy’s pens?es on redemption and salvation required an eightfi gure body count to be taken seriously by history...

...If he should happen to quote another writer it is second hand, as if to create the impression, unwillingly revealed, of a modicum of erudition...

...The fi rst underscores the Georgian’s capacity for konspiratsia and gangsterism, particularly in the fi ne art of sniffi ng out traitors...

...The loss of a comrade during a bank robbery incited this pseudo-profound elegy from the sometime versifi er: “What can we do...

...Then there was his exquisitely fatuous comment—repeated to perfect effect by a ponderous East German apparatchik in The Lives of Others— that “writers are the engineers of the soul...

...He also chose to leave the author of Dr...

...Trotsky once referred to a comrade as “well-read but not well educated,” a terse insight that contains a degree of sophistication Stalin could never approach...

...One can’t pick a rose without pricking oneself on a thorn...

...Pastoral shades of omelets and broken eggs...

...He once exhorted a crowd: “Do you think we can defeat the Tsar with empty hands...

...It was only through a tragicomic series of errors that he ever managed to inherit the throne of international Communism and destroy his more capable enemies, namely Trotsky...

...He occupied a middle position between these two roles, and his great luck in life was to have been born with all the vestments of ordinariness—a “plebian without pose, uncommunicative by nature, even embarrassed by strangers,” as the (sympathetic) journalist Emil Ludwig once described him...

...Indeed, the “gangster, godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist” might well have become the Baudelaire of Georgia had he not discovered revolution...

...Stalin asked Boris Pasternak if Mandelstam was a genius or not, the question that decided the poet’s fate...

...Stalin knew that brutality captivates the ordinary man as much as it does the psychopath...

...Better still was the Expropriators’ version of a Hallmark card—“The Bolshevik Committee proposes that your fi rm pay ___ roubles”—always delivered by Stalin’s tall, armed bodyguard...

...He was that already, said Peter...

...Finally, Sebag Montefi ore offers what is, to my mind, the most persuasive case against the hoary allegation that Stalin was a czarist spy...

...One could go on in this vein...

...Wrote Souvarine, the age-long tradition which revives to-day the name of Spartacus fi nds no expression in [Stalin’s] words, even though it is continued in his deeds...

...Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin...

...Nevertheless from a given moment he neither spoke nor wrote without quoting Lenin at every point, as if he owed everything to one book, a work in twenty volumes—just as Cromwell seems to have read only the Bible...

...So moving was the one entitled “Morning” that it evidently inspired an Armenian State Bank offi cial to become Stalin’s inside man for the infamous robbery at Yerevan Square in 1907—a heist that made international headlines and lined party coffers, to Lenin’s delight...

...Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men...

...Part of the problem is that Stalin was constantly in touch with gendarmes and spooks...

...Lenin expressed shock that Stalin had written his paper on the National Question all by himself— never mind that Nikolai Bukharin and a Viennese maid had to translate the German sources for him...

...But not for nothing did Lenin refer to his “fi ery Colchian” and judge Stalin “exactly the kind of person I need...

...As a seminarian he suffered the torments of a repressive and obnoxious priest, nicknamed Father Black Spot, who chased down every “forbidden” text and wayward student, instilling in Stalin the importance of “surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings” (these are the dictator’s own words) that would become the institutions of the Soviet state...

...Even as a star pupil of the Gori Church School, young Stalin could brook no rival for attention or physical prowess...

...It’s true that all the Bolsheviks, Stalin included, missed the biggest traitor of them all, Roman Malinovsky, the Okhrana agent who was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee and caused nearly every other member’s arrest...

...Enter Stalin’s Red Battle Squads, a half-terrorist, half-partisan outfi t that was tasked with these sub rosa activities, which could really only take place in the Caucasus, long a locus of cosmopolitan banditry...

...We can’t help but notice the monster evolving...

...Young Stalin is ambitiously introduced as a “pre-history of the USSR itself, a study of the subterranean worm and the silent chrysalis before it hatched the steel-winged butterfl y.” Well, we live in an age of prequels, and so a project like this surely tantalizes...

...Never...