Overview and Comments on Montefiori's "Stalin: The Age of Youth and Revolution" - Exploring the Roots of Stalin the Dictator
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953)Wikipedia.
Stalin: The Age of Youth and Revolution was published in 2010 by British historian Simon Seberg Montefiori.
Let's take a quick look at the book.
The Real Life of "Young Stalin."
Following "Stalin: The Red Czar and His Courtiers," the second installment in a two-part critical biography of Stalin's life, the first half of which is shrouded in mystery.
Born and raised in Georgia in 1878 to a poor shoemaker family, Stalin was awakened to Marxism while attending a seminary and abandoned his path to become a clergyman. With his comrades, he began a labor movement, including demonstrations and strikes, and rose to prominence throughout the Caucasus region. He also began to finance his activities through bank robberies, extortion, murder, and arson.He was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, escaped, and exiled, and had numerous relationships with women. In his first marriage, he neglected his family, and his young wife, Kato, died of illness, leaving behind a son. In exile, he had a bastard child and later married Nadja, who was 20 years younger than him.
Eventually, Stalin's activities were recognized by Lenin in exile, and he was transformed from a local activist to a Russian activist and elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. However, in 1912, after the February Revolution, he was exiled to bitterly cold Siberia for four years. He eventually returned to Russia and became Lenin's close associate, and in 1917, after the success of the October Revolution, he became a member of Lenin's leadership team.
The latest release of documents from the Georgian archives reveals the untold reality of the "young Stalin". The book is full of astonishing episodes about the Caucasian faction in his homeland, his childhood friend Kamo, the head of a band of robbers, his two marriages and flamboyant womanizing, and his complicated relationship with Lenin and Trotsky. This is truly a groundbreaking biography that approaches the origins of the birth of a dictator.
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This work has been introduced so farStalin, the Red Czar and His Courtiers.This work is a sequel to
While "Stalin: The Red Czar and His Courtiers" was a biography of Stalin after he seized power, this sequel is a biography focusing on Stalin's childhood and youth up to his seizure of power.
The translator's afterword summarizes the book in an easy-to-understand manner, so I will quote from it, although it is a bit lengthy.
Most biographies of Stalin, even if they cover his entire life, touch briefly on his boyhood and youth, and focus on his post-October Revolution years. There are also biographies of only the second half of his life. It is the latter half of his life that has immortalized Stalin's name, for better or worse, so it is not surprising.
I think there are only a few biographies that focus exclusively on the first half of Stalin's life prior to that, and this book by Simon Seberg Montefiori is just such a book.
Originally titled "Young Stalin" (Young Stalin), the book covers Stalin from his birth to just after the October Revolution of 1917.
But when the October Revolution took place, Stalin was almost thirty-nine years old. He had passed the halfway point of his life. His long "shadow" life up to that point would lead to his "front" life after the October Revolution.
The author's position is that the first and second halves of Stalin's life, which at first glance appear to be separate, are smoothly connected into one.
How could the "shadow" first half of his life lead to the "front" life after the October Revolution? After describing Stalin's later life in his previous book, "Stalin, the Red Czar and His Courtiers," author Montefiori continued to work on the secrets of his first half of life.
It seems that biographers have not often gone to Georgia, where Stalin was born and raised and where he began his career as a Marxist revolutionary, to explore the material.
Of course, foreign researchers were not allowed in principle to enter the archives of the state or the Communist Party during the Soviet era, and it was impossible to freely interview the people concerned.
However, even if this had been possible after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the researchers would have been discouraged from doing fieldwork by the unreasonable preconception that historical materials damaging to Stalin and valuable to historians had already been eliminated in the region where many storms of repression had raged, and could not possibly have survived. This must be the reason why the author says that Georgia has tended to be neglected as a place to search for biographical materials.
The author went to Georgia (not for the first time, as he covered the Georgian Civil War in the early 1990s as a journalist) and even appeared on TV to call for the provision of documents, researched archives, and interviewed people involved.
The research in the archives seems to have been made possible by special favors from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was also approached by the archivist. As a result, the author found many memoirs and documents (in Georgian, of course) of people who had relations with the young Stalin buried in the archives.
I also met the one hundred and ninety-nine year old relatives of Stalin's first wife, Kat (2005). Some materials were provided by members of the public. Many of them, such as quotations from memoirs dictated by Stalin's mother, Keke, in 1935, the last year of her life, are boasted by the author to be the first to be published or used in this book.
The fact that Stalin's account of his time in Georgia and the Caucasus in this book is much more detailed than in similar books is clearly not only due to the book's focus on the first half of his life alone.
Hakusuisha, Simon Seberg Montefiori,Stalin: The Age of Youth and Revolution, translated by Matsumoto Yukishige, p. 629-630
As mentioned in the afterword above, the book contains many descriptions based on newly discovered materials following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this book, facts that have been hidden in the dark of history are revealed one after another.
The fact that these materials were discovered in Georgia, far from Moscow, may have been a major reason why they were not destroyed.
In any case, this book shows that materials that could not be disclosed during the Soviet era have been coming out one after another since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that research on these materials is now underway. (*In September 2022, I visited the Stalin Museum in Stalin's hometown of Gori, Georgia. I discuss my experience there in the following article. (Please refer to it)
The previous book, "Stalin: The Red Czar and His Courtiers" was an exciting and quite interesting book, but this sequel is even more interesting. It was a very interesting look at the roots of the dictator Stalin.
The book tells the story of how the young Stalin achieved such a level of wisdom, talent, charisma, and intriguing scheming.
His birth and upbringing were unimaginable to those of us living in modern Japan. In a chaotic world of violence, terrorism, snitching, and secret police, he had to rely on his own strength to survive. The young Stalin lived in a world where a thousand strong men from all over the world competed with each other for supremacy.
It is amazing to read how he was able to cross over to the enemy and build his own organization under such harsh conditions. It is a very shocking book.
It is easy to see what a monster Stalin was. He did not become a dictator by luck alone. He grew into a charismatic figure through amazing experiences. I believe that learning about this process provides us with a very important insight into the history of the world and what war is all about.
I will read this book again in the next article as a continuation of "Reading the Biography of Stalin".
This is "Stalin: The Age of Youth and Revolution" - Exploring the Roots of Stalin the Dictator.
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