A Shropshire lad in Georgia
Christopher Silvester
Independent on Sunday – United Kingdom
Published: May 20, 2007
Stalin came to love life lived in the shadows, and Simon Sebag
Montefiore argues that the "world apart" of konspiratsia was the
crucial formative experience of his life. Born Josef Djugahsvili, this
son of a feckless Georgian cobbler and a proud, onward-urging mother,
may have been an autodidact, feasting as a teenager on forbidden books
smuggled into the Tiflis Seminary (French novels as well as Marxist
treatises), but instead of joining the priesthood he became a
terrorist-gangster mastermind who arranged bank-robberies (or
"heists", as Montefiore likes to call them), hijackings of mail ships,
raids on government arsenals, and the extortion of oil millionaires in
the Black Sea port of Batumi and the Caspian Sea port of Baku. All
proceeds of his crimes during the first two decades of the 20th
century went to the Bolshevik Party cause, for beyond a fondness for
wine and a dandyish interest in clothes (spurred by a chameleon-like
need to keep shedding and adopting disguises) he exhibited an ascetic
demeanour. His coolness and his self-assurance meant that he had
several narrow escapes, outwitting the various "spooks" detailed to
follow him. He once said that he was "like quicksilver", and so
Montefiore likens him to "Macavity, T S Eliot’s elusive cat". Lenin
called him his "wonderful Georgian" and it flattered him to be known
to some as Koba, after the romantic bandit-hero of a Caucasian novel.
When inside prison he would seek out the company of professional
criminals, preferring their company to that of his fellow
intellectuals. But outside prison his most consistent role was as the
uninvited guest, if not always the unwanted one. He was ready to doss
on the floors of friends and strangers (though he often managed to
snaffle a bed), rarely sleeping in the same place for long. Usually
he proved to be good company for the duration of his visit, carousing
and singing and reciting poems, but also eyeing any daughters of the
house – the younger the better – with a predatory twinkle.
Montefiore is apt to use the terms "psychopathic" or "semi-psychotic"
rather loosely, even when describing Stalin’s chief "enforcer and
cutthroat" Simon Ter-Petrossian, known as Kamo. But he is careful to
avoid applying any such term borrowed from clinical psychology to
define Stalin’s villainy. Instead, he resorts to the trope of the
loner shorn of conscience. At times Stalin resembles an existential
anti-hero, whose murderous appetite seems almost casual rather than
vicious. While eschewing all sentiment, he was also given to such
haphazard and unmediated acts of kindness and indulgence as seem to
accompany the corruption of absolute power. He was a lyric poet (a
Shropshire lad in Georgia) and Montefiore introduces each part of the
book with one of his poems. "You’d have made a great priest," a
qualified priest tells this charming, pockmarked troubadour at one
point. Lenin, for all his patina of gracious nobility, comes across as
the nastier personality, yet we know that Stalin would become the more
accomplished mass murderer. He did not so much wash the blood from his
hands as wash his hands in blood.
Not only did he graduate as an atheist while studying for the
priesthood, but also his experience of the repressive atmosphere in
the seminary may have been at the heart of his own later urge to
repress others. Beguiling, impregnating and abandoning women was a
forte. Although it is impossible to prove, Montefiore offers plausible
reasons for thinking that Stalin may have fathered the first of his
several bastards in 1899. He also thinks he may have pinpointed the
first instance where Stalin ordered someone’s death, as early as 1901.
With the aid of a printing press for publishing Bolshevik leaflets (in
both Georgian and Armenian) and grenades, his "Mauserists" terrorised
capitalist employers and police throughout the Caucasus, the 1907
Tiflis bank heist being the most newsworthy of his spectaculars. But
in 1917, he would develop calluses on his fingers from writing so
frantically for Pravda, which he edited. Stalin was unusual, being
"as adept at debating, writing and organising as he was at arranging
hits and heists", says Montefiore. "The command, harnessing and
provocation of turmoil were his gifts."
Most Tsarist exiles were holidays for left-wing intellectuals – one is
amazed at how leniently these sulphurous future revolutionaries were
treated – and up until 1915 Stalin had enjoyed a series of languorous
sojourns, with their picnics and mock trials and debates, their
frenzies of reading and their playful opportunities for escape. But
Stalin’s last exile was in the bitter-cold conditions of the distant,
sub-Arctic Siberian province of Turukhansk, where winter temperatures
dropped to -60 . In Kureika, a small village of 67 persons living in
primitive shacks, Stalin still managed to emerge as the alpha male,
acquiring skills as hunter and fisherman and taking as his mistress a
13-old peasant girl, whom he twice made pregnant. In Montefiore’s
estimation, this period was crucial to Stalin’s warped development:
"Perhaps Siberia froze some of the Georgian exoticism out of him. He
brought the self-reliance, vigilance, frigidity and solitude of the
Siberian hunter with him to the Kremlin."
Montefiore is occasionally guilty of introducing phrases in quotation
marks without indicating their source. His punctuation is often wild
(for which his copy editor must share the blame), his phraseology
sometimes rather crude, and his fondness for cinematic allusions
excessive. Nonetheless the overall impression is one of Carlylean
energy, or even incontinence, with his prose torrent-ing along. For as
much as he offends with the odd lumpen phrase, he dazzles with
others. For example, he talks of Stalin’s "feline charisma" and his
"Bedouin informality", declaring him an "expert at riding the random".
There is certainly no denying the doggedness of Montefiore’s research
or indeed his resourcefulness: he relies heavily on the archives of
the Georgian Filial Institute of Marxism-Leninism, which had been
closed until he persuaded the Georgian president to allow him access
to them. This treasure trove yielded up the memoirs of Stalin’s mother
among the memoirs of numerous family members and early friends and
acquaintances, several of which had been written before the Terror and
were thus unbowdlerised. In relation to this I must praise
Montefiore’s use of the footnote, that forgotten authorial art. Thus
he is able to maintain an intriguing commentary on sources as well as
to cast forward glances to the fates of Stalin’s (mostly unfortunate)
familiars and associates. Although there is an excellent epilogue, it
is helpful to know these things as the story unfolds and before
individuals are lost in the confusion of similar-sounding Caucasian
names.
On practically every page of Young Stalin there is a reason to smile
with satisfaction at the thrust of revelation, and often a reason to
gasp or even to chuckle. As quasi-academic populist biography goes,
therefore, this is as good as it gets.