The human monster

The best biography yet of Joseph Stalin traces his life from abused child to murderous dictator -- and forces us to ask whether he could have taken a different path.

By Andrew O'Hehir

May 5, 2005 | Stalin's poetry isn't too bad. It mainly consists of verses in a romantic-pastoral vein that was apparently conventional for Georgian poets of the 1890s:

The pinkish bud has opened,
Rushing to the pale-blue violet
And, stirred by a light breeze,
The lily of the valley has bent over the grass.

In English translation that's nothing more than pleasant. To readers of the Georgian language, according to biographer Robert Service, "it has a linguistic purity recognized by all" as well as an obvious nationalist subtext. (Writing about the loveliness of the Georgian landscape was understood as a wink and a nudge that the Tsarist censors would never notice.) That poem, "Morning" (which continues for two more stanzas), appeared in the radical intellectual magazine Kvali, and was then published in an influential textbook by the Georgian educator and nationalist Yakob Gogebashvili. As art by future dictators goes, that's a lot more success than Hitler ever enjoyed for his insipid watercolors.

Everyone in the modest literary scene of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, knew the author. He was a 17-year-old seminary student named Joseph (or Yoseb) Dzhughashvili, and he was smart, ambitious, headstrong and quick to anger. For two years young Dzhughashvili was a rising star in Georgian poetry, but he quit writing sometime around 1897 to focus his attention on another passion: revolutionary Marxism. Stalin loved nature and the outdoors to the end of his life, and grew flowers and lemon trees. But he never wrote a poem again.

How much different would 20th century history have been if that pockmarked young man, already a survivor of grinding poverty, an abusive family life and a bout of smallpox that nearly killed him at age 6, had stuck with the poetical muse? Service's fascinating new Stalin biography, the first comprehensive English-language treatment of his life since the opening of the Soviet archives in the mid-1990s, is full of historical what-ifs, some of them fanciful (like that one), others less so.

"Stalin: A Biography," like Simon Sebag Montefiore's 2004 "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," is a major landmark in the recent scholarly reassessment of the notorious dictator who consolidated Soviet power, launched vicious purges against his own people (and indeed his own political party), defeated the Nazis in World War II, and launched the Cold War. Service and Sebag Montefiore -- colleagues and to some extent rivals at Oxford -- aren't trying to excuse Stalin's crimes or apologize for them, but rather to rescue the real Stalin, as much as the record will let them, from the myths and caricatures that surround him.

If Stalin essentially created the Soviet Union in its finished form, Service argues, the Soviet state also created him, as the socialist demigod it needed to worship. The real Stalin had colleagues and sycophants, but almost no friends. He was a standoffish, awkward man, plagued by rheumatism, high blood pressure and bad teeth, whose idea of flirting with women (according to Service) was to flick bits of food across the table at them. He stood an unprepossessing 5-foot-6, wore the same clothes almost every day, and personally cut holes in his military boots to relieve the pressure of corns.

As he himself realized, the heroic, larger-than-life Stalin of Communist Party iconography was something entirely different. Sebag Montefiore quotes Stalin's adopted son, Artyom Sergeev, remembering a family fight in which Stalin berated his wastrel son Vasily for cashing in on his surname. "But I'm a Stalin too," Vasily protested. "No, you're not," Stalin replied. "You're not Stalin and I'm not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!"

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Service tries to answer the question of how one Stalin begat the other -- both how the Georgian seminarian became a mass killer and how the flesh-and-blood human became the mythical embodiment of Soviet power. If Sebag Montefiore's book, which is primarily a study of the dictator's inner circle during his years in power, makes for more vivid and exciting reading, Service's trumps all other volumes now available on Stalin's life. It synthesizes all the major narrative accounts and incorporates a good deal of revealing new information.

Hardly any historical figure of the 20th century has been written about more than Stalin, and few, Service and Sebag Montefiore would agree, have been as poorly understood. The caricature of Stalin as a bloodthirsty provincial buffoon, and perhaps a madman, was created by his enemies on the left -- but soon embraced by those on the right as well. When Stalin's rival Leon Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929, he wrote an influential memoir describing Stalin as a dim but vicious bureaucrat who could barely speak Russian, possessed no real understanding of Marxism, had played almost no role in the October Revolution of 1917, and had risen to the top of his party through sheer animal cunning.

Stalin's entirely typical mode of revenge -- he had Trotsky murdered in 1940, in his Mexican villa, with an icepick to the head -- did nothing to dispel this portrayal. Superficially, it seemed to account for his regime's horrors: the appalling famines; the ludicrous show trials of Stalin's revolutionary colleagues; the Great Terror of 1936-38, in which more than a million people died; the fear-ridden police state of his later years. But it only heightens the dramatic story of this extraordinary (and, yes, extraordinarily evil) man to grasp that the depiction is entirely false.

Trotsky and his left-wing followers didn't want to admit that they had been outsmarted by a superior politician after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 -- and they also didn't want to admit that Stalin's excesses were merely logical extensions of the Bolshevik obsession with centralized power and state terror. It was Trotsky himself who had said that the revolutionaries didn't have the right not to kill people in the process of building socialism. Stalin believed he was building socialism too -- and he deprived himself of the right not to kill millions.

Next Page: Before he became a revolutionary Marxist, Stalin was an abused child

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