Little Soso

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.

“Red Tsar” is how Simon Sebag Montefiore described Stalin in his previous book exploring the Kremlin mountaineer’s sanctum sanctorum of terrified toadies and sybaritic lieutenants. Having thus expertly dealt with the adult years, the historian now sets out to capture the totalitarian in bloom. 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 butterfly.”

Well, we live in an age of prequels, and so a project like this surely tantalizes. It also succeeds, on the whole. Sebag Montefiore has given us the most detailed and comprehensive portrait of the mass murdering ideologue just as he was getting warmed up. 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. We can’t help but notice the monster evolving.

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

It’s worth noting that Stalin’s rhetorical style also took shape during his larval revolutionary period. He once exhorted a crowd: “Do you think we can defeat the Tsar with empty hands? Never! We need three things: one–guns, two–guns and three, again and again–guns!” 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!” The loss of a comrade during a bank robbery incited this pseudo-profound elegy from the sometime versifier: “What can we do? One can’t pick a rose without pricking oneself on a thorn. Leaves fall from the trees in autumn–but fresh ones grow in the spring.”

Pastoral shades of omelets and broken eggs.

Even as a star pupil of the Gori Church School, young Stalin could brook no rival for attention or physical prowess. He deadlegged a boy who danced the Georgian lekuri better and nearly drowned another by pushing him into the Kura River. 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.”

That this troglodytic Aesop won himself a small army of early admirers should teach us something about human frailty. Stalin knew that brutality captivates the ordinary man as much as it does the psychopath. 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. 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 figurehead, a man capable of doing what they could only rationalize away.

One could go on in this vein. Yet there are three underlying themes that distinguish the present volume as perhaps the best-yet resource on Stalinology. The first underscores the Georgian’s capacity for konspiratsia and gangsterism, particularly in the fine art of sniffing out traitors. (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.) But not for nothing did Lenin refer to his “fiery Colchian” and judge Stalin “exactly the kind of person I need.” 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 officially outlawed criminal adventurism. Enter Stalin’s Red Battle Squads, a half-terrorist, half-partisan outfit that was tasked with these sub rosa activities, which could really only take place in the Caucasus, long a locus of cosmopolitan banditry.

The mind reels at the fact that the future Five Year Planner once toiled for a Rothschild oil concern in Batumi. Stalin seems to have consolidated his terrorist leadership while incarcerated. 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.” Better still was the Expropriators’ version of a Hallmark card–“The Bolshevik Committee proposes that your firm pay ___ roubles”–always delivered by Stalin’s tall, armed bodyguard.

Sebag Montefiore is also quite good at showing how the seminary dropout never really abandoned biblical messianism. If Stalin was, in fact, an atheist, then it was mainly for show, to prove his mettle as a Marxist. His metaphysical opportunism could cut both ways. 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. The czar used to be known as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and Peter the Great once pounded his chest in defiance of someone who suggested the appointment of a holy patriarch. He was that already, said Peter.

In Russia, it has never been enough to proclaim, L’Etat, c’est moi; one has also to add, L’Eglise, c’est moi. 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.” 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.”

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 first encountering the leader of the Bolsheviks? “Lenin had taken shape in my imagination as a stately and imposing giant. .  .  . Imagine my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary man, below average height, in no way different from ordinary mortals.” The italics are mine, but the language is hardly that of a strict materialist. 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 crucified on it.

Finally, Sebag Montefiore offers what is, to my mind, the most persuasive case against the hoary allegation that Stalin was a czarist spy. Much of the controversy has rested on the only official-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 Tiflis bureau of the Okhrana. The letter was likely forged and has never been corroborated by any other czarist record. True, Stalin may have ordered these destroyed, but Sebag Montefiore points out that many of the Bolsheviks who charged him with betrayal had their timelines confused.

Part of the problem is that Stalin was constantly in touch with gendarmes and spooks; it was his job to cultivate them as contacts. Thus, he did the bulk of the recruitment and was on the receiving, not the giving, end of the intelligence nexus. 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.

Moreover, Okhrana agents were typically well compensated and lived lavish lifestyles, whereas Stalin was perennially poor and bedraggled. 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 infiltrated the Baku Bolshevik Party. Stalin liquidated countless others in false pursuit of these slippery figures, and Sebag Montefiore 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.”

Young Stalin is not without its lapses. 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. 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. Sebag Montefiore, 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.

Indeed, the “gangster, godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist” might well have become the Baudelaire of Georgia had he not discovered revolution. At 16, Stalin wrote romantic poems that earned the respect of the celebrated poet Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, who published them in the newspaper Iveria. So moving was the one entitled “Morning” that it evidently inspired an Armenian State Bank official 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.

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. In trying to portray Stalin as an unheralded brain of Bolshevism, Sebag Montefiore fails to cite a single utterance or piece of writing that distinguishes his subject for candlepower. Stalin’s contemporaries–not all of whom were ten-dentious antagonists–grasped his mediocrity better. Noe Jordania, a real Georgian intellectual, told him to study more before presuming to write for the radical newspaper Kvali; 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.

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.” 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.

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

No doubt there are Philistines with a bit of verbal recall who envy the gem-like flame in others without quite knowing how to appreciate it, much less embody it, themselves. Stalin asked Boris Pasternak if Mandelstam was a genius or not, the question that decided the poet’s fate. He also chose to leave the author of Dr. Zhivago alone for being a “cloud-dweller.” 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.” The studious priest-in-training might have smuggled forbidden literature into his bunk at night, but someone who scribbled “ha-ha-ha!” next to Tolstoy’s pensées on redemption and salvation required an eight-figure body count to be taken seriously by history.

Boris Souvarine, one of Stalin’s earliest biographers and more fluent 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. Wrote Souvarine, the

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

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. W.H. Auden had it right in his “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” composed in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact:

Michael Weiss is the New York editor of Pajamas Media.