The portrait created by the author is of a man so obsessed by politics and Marxist ideology that he has no time for home-building or spousal responsibilities.
Young, handsome and charismatic, he has no problems in securing mistresses, including one who is underage. His first wife dies tragically early, and Stalin feels guilty for neglecting her. Montefiore doesn’t neglect Stalin’s personal life. His alcoholic and cruel father, who may not have been been his biological father, introduced young Stalin to violence early on, but instilled within him a self-sufficiency and instinct for survival. Although childhoods in the biographies of great people can be the dullest sections of the book, Montefiore paints a vivid picture of Stalin’s formative years. This insight creates the idea in the reader’s mind of a man who never paid much attention to laws or authority. The author’s telling of the events comprising Stalin’s life from his birth in 1878 to his rise to influence among the Bolshevik revolutionaries opens with a teasing prologue detailing Stalin’s role in a notorious bank robbery. ‘Young Stalin’ tells the story of Stalin’s early life, from his provincial and humble beginnings in Georgia, a southern outpost of the Russian Empire, to the moment when he seized real political power during the October Revolution of 1917, when he was in his late thirties. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s celebrated biography, which was first published in 2008, is being reprinted in paperback. Such an intriguing and eventful personal history has ensured that he is prime subject matter for historians. Whatever else anyone might say against Joseph Stalin, the most notorious tyrant of the Twentieth Century, nobody can accuse him of having lived a dull or conventional life.
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