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 enlarge | Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
Creator: Sean Barrett
Publisher: Orion
Category: Book
List Price: £14.99
Buy New: £4.87
You Save: £10.12 (68%)
New (24) from £4.87
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 58501
Format: Audiobook, Cd
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Items: 6
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0752888544
EAN: 9780752888545
ASIN: 0752888544
Publication Date: May 3, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Sealed and New. Case may be cracked but goods inside as new. In stock - Sent fast from British booksellers.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-7 of 7 | | « PREV | | |
A Brilliant Picture of the Young Stalin August 6, 2007
9 out of 14 found this review helpful
Montefiore focuses on many sources only available since glasnost to reveal much about Stalin's early life. In doing so we learn much about Stalin as a passionate Georgian - he nearly got kicked out of the Party at one stage for wanting a Georgian version of Bolshevism. We also learn he was a remarkably talented poet, even in translation; courageous to the point of, and even beyond folly; and utterly committed to his cause as well as being a lifelong committed student. When his comrades were carousing Stalin could be found lying on the floor at a party reading Napoleon's memoirs, and claiming to be making notes on his mistakes.
He was highly intelligent and possessed enormous self-discipline which he put at the disposal of the revolution. Unlike some histories I have read, Montefiore makes it clear that Lenin knew him well and valued his ruthlessness.
We all know how destructive Stalin became as a world leader. But if you read Richard Pipes' history of Russia and become aware of how ill-equipped Russia was as a modern state at the time of the Revolution perhaps it becomes possible to make sense of how someone like Stalin could be as aware of a sense of destiny as he apparently was. This also comes out in Montefiore's other book, the 'Court of the Red Tsar'.
Outstanding May 20, 2007
66 out of 72 found this review helpful
A simply superb account of Stalin's early years, with an unparalleled depth of research. I had thought that Edward Ellis Smith's 'The Young Stalin' would be near-impossible to beat, but Sebag Montefiore has made important and revealing discoveries, not just in Moscow archives, but crucially in Georgia too.
For the first time, Stalin's pre-Revolutionary career as a professional revolutionary-cum-gangster, organising robberies - including the famous Tiflis one of 1907 - extortion, arson, piracy and murder is comprehensively laid out. But the author also shows that Stalin's political organisational skills, his importance to Lenin and to the Bolshevik movement - and the reasons for them - have been underplayed by enemies like Trotsky, who called him a 'mediocrity', so we get a more fully-rounded view of the young Stalin than was available previously, and one that helps explain his subsequent rise to power.
The author states that the book is the result of almost ten years of research, and he has truly found astonishing new sources. For example, memoirs about Stalin collected in Russia before the Terror in 1937 were often found to be surprisingly frank, tactless or derogatory - but they were not destroyed. They were simply preserved in the archives, and they have survived.
Stalin's attractiveness to women, and an impressive love-life - even when on the run - is laid out too, right down to the secret 1956 KGB investigation into Stalin's seduction and impregnation of a 13-year old girl during one of his Siberian exiles.
The author's interviewees even include a 107-year old woman relative of Stalin's first wife Kato, who told of the young couple's married life, how Stalin's in-laws blamed him for her early death at 22, and how Stalin lost control at the funeral and threw himself into the grave with the coffin.
The style is immensely readable too, never losing sight of the human factors amidst the detail, with well-written, compact chapters.
I enjoyed the author's previous work on Stalin : 'The Court of the Red Tsar', and would recommend both books to anyone interested in the subject matter. (I am also amazed that no televison company seems to have seen the potential to use the books as a basis for documentary programmes.)
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