Recensione al nuovo libro di Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin. L’autore racconta la giovinezza del futuro dittatore attraverso un ritratto che riesce a capovolgere l’immagine stereotipata largamente diffusa fino a oggi.
Quella risultante è l’immagine di un giovane con una Mauser nella cintura, rapinatore, agitatore sociale, marxista e cospiratore che già nelle sue imprese giovanili dette chiara dimostrazione di quelle capacità di leader che lo avrebbero portato al potere.
Psychological profiling is big business these days. Any senior police officer can reel off the characteristics of a gang leader or successful mafia boss. Intelligence is high on the list, followed by charisma, that magnetic hold over men and women that is itself the product of confidence and drive. Vital in a criminal mastermind, these are the qualities needed by politicians, too, and it would be surprising if anyone could rise to eminence without them. However, largely thanks to Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s great political rival (and ultimately his most infamous victim), our picture of the future leader of the communist world is different. Trotsky’s Stalin is an oaf, a grey blur who shoe-horned his lumpen body into power through ruthless cruelty, duplicity and feral ambition.
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s brilliantly researched and readable portrait of Stalin’s youth ought to dispel this lingering myth for ever. He gives us Stalin with a Mauser in his belt, Stalin the rabble-rouser, bank-robber and Marxist conspirator. He also gives us Stalin the tireless scholar, a man who read Plato in the original Greek and studied Napoleon’s memoirs, taking note of each mistake. The picture that emerges is more colourful and more chilling, but above all it is more credible.
Stalin’s childhood would certainly interest the profilers. His cobbler father, penniless and violent, neglected the family except when demanding money or bullying his only surviving child. Young Stalin learned mistrust and deception even as he also acquired - from his ambitious mother - a taste for reading, poetry and music. The future dictator’s artistic talent [...] won praise from everyone who heard him sing, while his poetry [...] lyrically evokes the late 19th-century Caucasus. The boy excelled at school and despised classmates who shirked their studies. He was destined for the church.
All this would change when he encountered the world of politics. The Georgia where Stalin grew up was a deeply political place [...]. The expansion of the railways had encouraged economic and social change, while engineering and construction work brought new people and ideas to the region. An oil boom in neighbouring Baku and the construction of a pipeline via Georgia’s port at Batumi provided recruitment grounds for a revolutionary movement that preached equality and social justice. Instead of enrolling for the priesthood, young Stalin joined the pamphleteers of the left. A clever and compelling speaker, he also delighted in action, showing from the very outset that he was a man of practical deeds. One of his first jobs was as a storeman at the Rothschilds’ refinery in Batumi. It took him almost no time to arrange the fire that gutted it and also to set its workers ablaze with political demands.
Stalin’s life was devoted to the revolution [...]. On a daily basis, however, raising cash was as vital as discussing theory. Stalin’s right-hand man was a psychopath called Kamo (Simon Ter-Petrossian), and it was through him that he carried out his most spectacular bank robbery, an attack on the State Bank in Tiflis (Tbilisi), the Georgian capital, in 1907. Sebag Montefiore’s book opens with a set-piece description of the episode, as dramatic a crime as any writer could wish to narrate. What is striking, however, is the level of its organisation. Stalin even paid Tiflis street-children to act as spies and look-outs. The skills that the Georgian would later bring to government were evident that summer morning in the square. The young revolutionary was not immune from arrest, and Stalin spent years in exile in the Russian north and east. [...] What was clear, too, was his power to recruit local people’s support [...]. His attraction for women was crucial. [...] He lightened the dreariness of exile by seducing local schoolgirls, at least two of whom bore his children. Back home, he married, was widowed, mourned, and then embarked on a succession of affairs. His approach was casual, since sex, and certainly romance, were less important to him than Marxism and the cause. As Sebag Montefiore speculates, this history may have inured him to sexual licence among his later followers. [...]
Stalin appealed to Lenin from the first. The "marvellous Georgian" was an ideal revolutionary lieutenant. In the confusion that followed the Bolshevik coup in the autumn of 1917, Lenin rapidly came to rely on the younger man’s decisiveness and practical skills, dismissing many of his longer-serving comrades as "tea-drinkers". The real co-founder of the Bolshevik regime, admittedly, was Trotsky, not Stalin, but the Georgian now counted as his true rival. Intellectuals such as Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev may not have seen this at the time, and history has continued to underestimate the rough-looking man from the Caucasus, but the evidence was all there two decades before the purge that would make Stalin an absolute ruler. Sebag Montefiore rightly ends with a reminder that Stalin’s dictatorship was not inevitable; mere personality does not decide whole people’s fates. Stalinism was a multi-faceted political system unique to its time. For all that, however, anyone who wants to understand it, and to understand the shaping of one of history’s bloodiest dictators, must read this original and thought-provoking book.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin, pp. 496, Weidenfeld, £25. | |
