KEY POINTS:
It is difficult to resist the almost universal approbation accorded to Sebag Montefiore and his biographies of Catherine the Great and lover Potemkim, and of Stalin during his years of power before, during and after World War II. But this is Russian history after all, a minefield for Western journalists - even those educated at Cambridge - and, with Stalin particularly, Sebag had a two-part problem.
At face value, the enigmatic dictator was no hero (even biographies need a shade of colour in their subjects) and all Stalin's official records (police, birth, marital, prison, medical, etc) had been destroyed on his own orders, along with his personal and official correspondence. All links to his early life had been obliterated by the crafty mass murderer. Even by flexible Western standards this was no hero; rather a gangster such as Al Capone or even a genocidal maniac - the Idi Amin of the Soviet Union.
Enter a centre-right fairy godfather named Mikhail Gorbachev, who with the policy called openness, lifted the veil on Moscow's and Georgia's blushing archives. Montefiore feasted on this material for 10 years and soon discovered in the police records the shadowy figure of a young criminal guilty of almost every anti-social activity on the calendar - a murderer, arsonist, bank robber, blackmailer and terrorist who, it turned out, was attractive to women and a seducer of young girls. This was the man later to dub himself Joseph Stalin, the young Georgian seminarian, a rebel devoid of ethics, already a disciple of Marxist Bolshevism, who soon became the leading activist in the turbulent Caucasian provinces.
In Georgia, Montefiore found his hero and also his own ancestral roots, plus a propensity (like Stalin's) of acquiring new names (hence the Sebag). He also found in the official records enough material for a second book on Stalin which soon became the prequel to the weighty biography. (Young Stalin is destined to become a Hollywood blockbuster.) Stalin was ever the arch conspirator.
He often escaped capture by bribing the local constabulary and by persuading key officials in corrupt old imperial Russia to become his informants. His daring bankroll heist in old Tiflis (now Tbilisi) in 1907 sent shockwaves throughout imperial Russia and was publicised as far away as London, Paris and Chicago. It was Lenin who ordered the Tiflis bank robbery and thence forward Stalin became the Bolsheviks' principal henchman and fundraiser.
By 1912 he was a member of the Central Committee, an occasional visitor to Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of their nomadic leadership cell in Petersburg, Cracow and Vienna. Then he staunchly defended his fellow committeeman, the slimy double agent Malinovsky of being - guess what? - a double agent, who responded by getting all but one committeeman arrested.
Sentenced to three years' exile in Siberia, Stalin still believed Malinovsky to be his friend and wrote to him begging for books and money. Stalin was soon back in Petersburg editing Pravda, his own daily broadsheet, and again socialising with Malinovsky. He was again arrested and this time sentenced to four years in Northern Siberia close to the Arctic Circle. There he returned to nature embedded with a peasant family and before long a young girl was expecting his child. He became a hunter and backwoodsman after the style of Davy Crockett - a trapper trapped in his own furs, his own conscience. This was an idyllic period for Stalin still under a loose sort of supervision and perhaps the only time in all his life when he succumbed to his own emotions.
In later years Stalin suppressed or erased all official data on his murky past, including the son he sired in Siberia and left behind. Simon Sebag Montefiore has resurrected them.
Young Stalin
By Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson $34.99)
* John Cumming is an Auckland reviewer.
