The human monster

On some level, Trotsky, like Lenin before him, was afflicted by class prejudice, of all things: They didn't believe that a cobbler's son from Georgia who hadn't been to university could be as smart as they were. As Service presents him, young Joseph Dzhughashvili was strikingly intelligent from the start. He was born in Gori, a scenic Georgian valley town of 30,000 people, in 1878. (For uncertain reasons, Stalin always claimed to be a year younger than that.) He excelled in school immediately, and was put on the fast track toward the Russian Orthodox priesthood, about the most prestigious occupation a poor boy from the outer boondocks of the Russian Empire could hope for.

By the time he dropped out of the Tbilisi seminary and shifted his allegiance from God to Marxism, Dzhughashvili had had "a fairly broad education by the European standards of the time." He had read Xenophon and Plato in the original, along with a good deal of Russian and Georgian literature. (Throughout his life he revisited the Georgian national epic "Knight in the Panther's Skin," by the 13th century poet Shota Rustaveli.) He had studied some higher mathematics, the history of the Romanov dynasty, and of course a lot of Christian theology. He had developed tastes of his own, too; he was twice disciplined for smuggling in novels by Victor Hugo ("modern" literature being forbidden).

Trotsky would never have admitted it, but Stalin became an intellectual in adult life, after his own dogmatic fashion. His essays synthesizing Lenin's thought were clear and capable, and often more readable than the Bolshevik founder's tangled prose. (Contrary to what most in the West assumed, Stalin never allowed a ghostwriter to touch his prose.) Although all sorts of spurious Marxist "science" was promulgated under Stalin's reign, he was personally well informed on scientific and technological issues, and continued to read widely. The Soviet state proclaimed Gorky, Pushkin and to some extent Tolstoy as its literary avatars, but Stalin told his daughter that Dostoevski (although banned for his right-wing Christian mysticism) was the greatest Russian novelist.

All this was more remarkable when you consider his background. Joseph was the only child of a violent and abusive family. His parentage is not entirely clear. His father of record, Beso Dzhughashvili, was a cobbler who was driven out of business and forced to work in a factory. (Clearly this helped form young Joseph's view of capitalism.) Beso drank heavily and beat Joseph and his mother Keke, while Keke was rumored to be sexually promiscuous and perhaps a prostitute. All this stood out in Georgia, which Service describes as a clan-based culture closer in tone to that of Greece or Italy than to Russia. Sex and gender roles were clearly defined, but family violence was unusual and parents tended to dote on their children.

As Service says, no psychology degree is required to see the roots of a disordered personality in this story. Certainly most people who are beaten viciously by their parents don't grow up to be murderous dictators, but then again, they don't usually get the chance. To the world's misfortune, this shrewd and ambitious young man collided with the fast-rising politics of revolutionary communism.

Joseph's boyhood friends in Gori remembered him for his pugnacity; he fought bigger and stronger boys who were likely to beat him badly, and then he sought out weaker, smaller boys to dominate. In later life, Stalin would use the image of physical beating over and over again in his speeches and writings. In 1931, when he was driving the Soviet economy furiously forward through the first Five-Year Plan, he gave a memorable speech to a conference of industrial managers:

"The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian lords. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness."

Service notes the emotional intensity of the speech, but not its potent connection to Stalin's own childhood, with its memories of both beatings and, from the Russian point of view, cultural backwardness. Lenin and Trotsky encouraged and committed acts of ruthless violence during the October Revolution and the ensuing Civil War, but they did so essentially as bourgeois dilettantes. Lenin was born into the lower Russian nobility and Trotsky into the Jewish intelligentsia. Stalin was a true son of the working class, forged by violence of the most intimate kind, and under his leadership the dictatorship of the proletariat was going to make damn sure it administered the beatings rather than receiving them.

Next Page: Stalin came to see his own survival as crucial to the possibility of global communism

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