HistoryWhy do we find it so disconcerting to learn that a mass murderer such as Stalin loved gardening, music, literature, wrote poetry, and attracted intense loyalty among his friends? Is it because we need to put a distance between the man we know to have committed the horrors associated with his name and ourselves; to dismiss him as a paranoid maniac devoid of human emotion?
In Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore provides a rounded and detailed account of his subject and his formation, from his beginnings in the violent little Georgian town of Gori to the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917. If never likeable, he makes him certainly more comprehensible.
Of all the mid-20th-century European dictators, Stalin's early years have remained relatively unknown, clouded by myth and Soviet hagiography. The book provides a prequel to the main focus of Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, and one can understand how he was drawn to discover the origins of associations between Stalin and his circle, many originating in his turbulent youth. Henchmen of the 1930s, such as Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, and Molotov, were already Stalin's friends and co-conspirators two decades earlier.
Montefiore provides a vivid sense of the Georgian society in which Stalin grew up, from his childhood in Gori and his student days in the seminary in Tiflis (from which he was not expelled for revolutionary activities, as the traditional account would have it, but because the authorities, in an effort to rid themselves of this insubordinate student, raised the fees to a level he was unable to pay and he dropped out) to successive terms of imprisonment and internal exile.
The young Stalin that emerges is in sharp contrast with the serious-minded, ascetic young communist beloved of such Soviet fiction as Ostrovsky's How the Steel was Tempered.
Stalin's youth was peppered with street brawling, bank robberies, coach hold-ups, blackmailing rackets and even acts of piracy on the Black Sea, the thefts apparently sanctioned by the Bolshevik leadership to boost party funds. Probably uncertain of the identity of his own father, he fathered at least three illegitimate children, as well as three legitimate ones.
One can observe certain character traits present from an early stage: the intense desire to dominate; the often vicious attacks on opponents; the urgency to root out spies, real or imagined, that were to characterise Stalin as a leader. But part of the pathology surely also lies in the circumstances of his formation.
There really were spies and informers, most famously Malinovsky, trusted member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and police agent, who assisted in bringing about Stalin's arrest in 1913. However, Montefiore dismisses allegations that Stalin was himself a spy, attributing his successes and escapes to police incompetence.
Montefiore's use of sources is impressive and the book includes some striking photographs. It is astonishing that whereas witnesses themselves may have fallen victim to Stalin's murders, their testimonies survived.
The archives remained long closed, but they don't seem to have been filleted. Unpublished accounts by Stalin's mother, family friends, in-laws and other contemporaries, have remained. Montefiore was even able to interview a few surviving individuals from Stalin's youth.
Occasionally, however, he seems to cross the line between circumstantial evidence and proof, as in his account of Stalin's piracy, where in one instance he discusses the inconclusive nature of the evidence but two paragraphs later accepts it as given.
Nevertheless, this is a fascinating book and an absorbing read that throws real light on the formation of a dictator.
ONE HORRIFIC ASPECT of Stalinism in practice is examined in Lynne Viola's The Unknown Gulag. It is now just over 50 years since Khrushchev began uncovering Stalinist crimes but the process has been painfully slow, mainly owing to a heritage of fear and the inaccessibility of documentation. The silence was punctuated by works such as Solzhenitzyn's novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and his monumental study, The Gulag Archipelago, and Roy Medvedev's examinations of Stalinism in Let History Judge and All Stalin's Men. Since the 1990s, with the opening of archives, historians have been able to piece together a more detailed picture.
Lynne Viola, who has studied the fate of peasants during Stalin's collectivisation, has focused here on the so-called "special settlements", not the prison colonies of the Gulag but forced resettlements of peasants.
These were established to deal with two issues perceived as problematic by the Soviet leadership. One was the need to colonise and exploit the resources of thinly populated regions, especially in Northern Russia and Siberia, but also in Kazakhstan. The other was the removal of better off "kulaks", who might oppose the process of collectivisation. Apart from the 30,000 or so peasants summarily executed during the collectivisation of agriculture in 1930 and 1931, almost two million more were forced into these settlements, deprived of Soviet citizenship and used as forced labour.
Frequently just dumped in an area with minimal provision for their survival, the deported kulaks had to fend for themselves and were victim to epidemic illnesses, hunger, exhaustion and the abuses of brutal, corrupt and drunken commandants. Tens of thousands died, while the internal exile of the survivors lasted until 1954, when they were released.
The whole enterprise was carried out in the chaos and lack of organisation that characterised so much of Stalinist policy, despite its rhetoric of control and planning.
Viola traces the operation of the settlements and their effects, pointing out that despite all the suffering endured by the kulaks, the policy, even in economic terms, was an unmitigated disaster, costing the state almost twice the sum it made by seizing property from the kulaks, since the settlements were simply unsustainable.
IF VIOLA'S ACCOUNT is dark, Nicholas Werth's book is the stuff of nightmares. It recounts the fate of 6,000 "special settlers", rounded up in Moscow and Leningrad in 1933 and sent to the island of Nazino in the Ob River in Western Siberia.
Simply dumped, without rations other than some sacks of flour and lacking any equipment or shelter, the deportees, many already weak and ill when they arrived, died in large numbers or drowned trying to escape by river. Some turned to cannibalism to survive; others fell foul of the armed guards, several of whom hunted them like wild animals.
In all, approximately 4,000 people disappeared in Nazino, a figure which, Werth points out, represented "at most 1 per cent of the total number of deportees who vanished in 1933". The story caused a scandal at the time, but it did not halt the policy of "cleansing the cities of harmful elements".
What do today's citizens of the former USSR make of their history? Are they interested or would they prefer to draw a line under the past?
Werth, a French historian, and a team of Russian historians affiliated to the organisation Memorial, prepared a seven-volume documentary history of the Gulag, published in 2004, of which his study of the Nazino incident represented a small part. Formed in 1988 and embracing dozens of organisations in states of the former USSR, Memorial seeks to document and commemorate past civil rights abuses and to oppose those that remain, aiming to present history as "an unbroken whole of the past, the present, and the future". Perhaps it will provide a means of freeing Russia from the shadow of its past.
Carla King studied Russian history at the school of Slavonic and East European studies, University of London. She is lecturer in modern history at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, where she teaches Russian history
Young Stalin By Simon Sebag Montefiore Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 397pp. £25 The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements By Lynne Viola Oxford University Press, 278pp. £17.99 Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag By Nicholas Werth Princeton University Press, 223pp. $24.94