Young Stalin

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The companion to the acclaimed "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" delivers the revelatory account that finally unveils the shadowy journey from obscurity to power of the man who, along with Hitler, personifies evil. 32 pages of photographs.

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Library Journal (10/15/2007)
We know him as Stalin, or Josef Stalin, but before he settled on this alias he had at least a dozen others, including Koba and Soso. His youthful friends were responsible for most of his monikers, which were sometimes taken of necessity to escape from the Okhrana (secret police) and the local police. No book published in the last 100 years goes into as much detail about the youthful Stalin as Montefiore's does. Unlike Sarah Davies and James Harris's Stalin: A New History, which has a 25-page chapter covering Stalin's youth, Montefiore (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar) uses many newly available archival records from Stalin's peers to greatly amplify information on the man's early years and his growing attachment to the revolutionary movement. Stalin's early experiences shaped his paranoia for the rest of his life, and his revolutionary experiences reinforced it. Montefiore says, "The machine of repression, the flinthearted, paranoid psychology of perpetual conspiracy and the taste for extreme bloody solutions to all challenges were not just accidents, but glamorized and institutionalized. He was patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification." Montefiore goes on to refute the notion that Stalin was a double agent of the Okhrana and that he "missed the revolution," ideas that his detractors formulated from flimsy evidence. This accessible book is highly recommended for academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/07.]-Harry Willems, Park City P.L., KS

ISBN: 1400044650 | EAN: 9781400044658
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group  | Publication Date: October, 2007

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