I've just read Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography of Stalin's early life and career, Young Stalin, and it is not often that one is forced so radically to alter one's entire view of someone so famous.
I am not saying that I came away from the book struck by how Stalin was actually just a regular guy, or that he was deeply misunderstood and not at all a monster. Anything but: the Stalin presented to us is quite clearly a case of the boy as father of the man.
But I - like just about everyone else in the West, I should say - had always fallen for Trotsky's version of events. I thought that Stalin's early life was that of a grey, dour, methodical man who ground his way to the stop through scheming, opportunism and a mastery of the processes of bureaucracy. I had a view of him as the methodical counterpart to Hitler's sub-artistic, charismatic leader of men: an impression gleaned in large part from Allan Bullock's great study of the pair.
In fact, it transpires that the young Stalin - or Soso, as he was known by many at the time - was by far the more glamourous, artistic and even charismatic. While Hitler daubed postcards, Stalin wrote poetry. And not doggerel: Stalin organised a huge bank robbery in Georgia - one reported around the world at the time - thanks largely to having someone on the inside. That insider helped Stalin because of his love of the young revolutionary's poetry: poetry written as a schoolboy which, nonetheless, was published widely long before Soso became Stalin. He was a beautiful singer, a dedicated and brilliant student, and a talented (if sometimes mercurial) teacher. The later cult of personality had much to work with.
This Stalin - despite the pockmarks of childhood disease, a limp and a crippled arm - leaves a trail of lovers and illegitimate children behind him. He is adored and feared. Ominously, he already has an obsession with betrayal by the time he is a seminarian training for the priesthood. In his teens, he beats and organises the ostracisation of a former friend who betrays one of his circle. By his early twenties, a police spy is murdered after Stalin (correctly) guesses at his pretense. He has potential recruits lead past him in the street, while he stands behind a window and watches. Some, he chooses. Others, he rejects as traitors. He believes he can tell a spy at a glance. And in Georgia, agents of the police are everywhere.
Was Stalin one of them? Montefiore certainly leaves us with the impression that Stalin played a double game, using the police to get rid of rivals and enemies. He was ruthless: that much is no surprise. He got a job at the Rothschilds' refinery in Batumi, and almost immediately had it set ablaze. The workers fight the fire, which entitled them to a bonus. But, as Stalin surely knew, the bonus was not paid, due to the suspicion of arson. So Stalin then uses that to call the workers out on strike, despite knowing that the managers' suspicions are right! Similarly, he organised a May-Day rally, personally encouraged the workers to attack, assuring them that the Cossacks would not shoot them, clearly despite knowing that the soldiers certainly would do just that. Then he uses the resulting deaths to his own ends. Stalin was already casual with the lives of others, in order to promote the cause.
He was also, unlike Hitler, a young man of repeated and successful action. Raising funds for the cause, he joins a pirate gang. Much successful pirating later, he kills his colleagues, takes the money, and takes it back across the Caucasus on donkey-back, quoting his own poetry as he goes. This Stalin appealed greatly to Lenin, who saw Stalin as a direct man of action, long before his rise to prominence in 1917. The directness Lenin meant can be seen in Stalin's right-hand man - Kamo - who would beg Stalin to let him slit the throats of victims, and who would literally cut out the heart of an enemy. Stalin was able to control such men and women - bandits, revolutionaries, psychopaths and conspirators alike - because they wanted to follow "the young man with the burning eyes". This is very unlike the Stalin I thought I knew.