Young Stalin
The shadowy journey from obscurity to power of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red Tsar--the man who, along with Hitler, remains the modern personification of evil: a merciless psychopath who was, as well, a consummate politician, the dynamic world statesman who helped create and industrialize the USSR, outplayed Churchill and Roosevelt, and defeated Hitler? Historian Montefiore tells the story of a charismatic, turbulent boy born into poverty, of doubtful parentage, scarred by his upbringing but possessed of unusual talents. Admired as a romantic poet and trained as a priest, he found his true mission as a fanatical revolutionary. A mastermind of bank robbery, protection rackets, arson, piracy and murder, he was equal parts terrorist, intellectual and brigand. The paranoid criminal underworld was Stalin's natural habitat, and murderous banditry and political gangsterism, combined with pitiless ideology, enabled Stalin to dominate the Kremlin--and create the USSR in his flawed image.--From publisher description.
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What Hacker News says
- They actually learned it from Stalin who ran organized crime gangs before the revolution that did extortion, racketeering, armed robbery, and piracy on the high seas among other things to fund Lenin's revolution. Young Stalin by Montefiore gets really deep into this. It's a very interesting read.
- One of the fun things about reading Young Stalin, which is a biography of Stalin from birth to the Russian revolution, is nobody liked him in Georgia where he grew up, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, so it was easy for the biographer to get sources to tell all the negative and horrifying details of his earlier life building and running organized crime gangs to fund the Russian revolution. Imagine the most paranoid narcissistic jerks you've ever known who also happen to be exceptionally intelligent decide to take over a country and they manage to pull it off. Fascinating stuff.
- > it becane a tradition for russian czars to go lenient on the most dangerous people society had produced when it came to their own safety.
Was it this, or was it that they were imprisoning so may people that killing them all was impractical? Separating the bad from the very bad became rather tricky as the state disintegrated.
> If I'm not mistaken, Lenin himself, and even Stalin, were exiled
Simon Sebag-Montefiore has done a great book about Stalin’s early years [1]. The follow [2] on is good too, but even darker.
- Stalin was very well read and and could recall his sources quickly. He was also reckless and good looking - his career path is not that of your typical bank robber. Simon Sebag Montefiore has written some worthwhile books on his life. ‘Young Stalin’ is an interesting read [1].
Stalin was a truely terrible human.
- Montefiore's "Young Stalin" which covers his life from birth to the revolution is a wild book. I like Montefiore because he has a real respect for the maniac genius and energy of the guy. What kind of person does it take to overthrow a whole society?
"Court of the Red Tzar" is less fun and more of a portrait of him using his enormous capacity to work and execute to relentlessly grind out his plans to take over the world in the name of Marxism/Leninism and absolutely steamrolling over anyone or anything in the most brutal way possible that got in his way.
One of the things that people miss about Stalin is that more than any leader in the past centuries, he wasn't a puppet for a shadowy cabal, or a front man for someone else, he was fully totally in charge and running the whole thing totally outmaneuvering Trotsky and anyone else who would attempt to grab power away from him. He could do this because he had a legendary memory for people and their personalities. He was able to take over the government by remembering thousands of people who he considered loyal to him and placing them in key posts throughout the government after he was appointed party secretary. There have been very few leaders with that sort of raw cognitive capability.
- He was an incredible man. A megalomaniac, pathologically violent tyrant, and it's one hell of a life he led. The accounts of his behaviour are just horrifying. I can't recommend the various books on him by Simon Sebag Montefiore enough (and also his book on Jerusalem, and the one on the Romanovs, but that's off topic).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/826564.Young_Stalin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/282108.Stalin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9477628-jerusalem https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21094391-the-romanovs
