Red star rising

He was a poet, a singer and a voracious reader. He memorized works by Gogol and Chekhov and amused himself with Thackeray, Balzac and Plato. At seminary, he’d sneak his worldly texts in and read by candlelight, sometimes hiding the banned books in stacks of firewood. He intensively studied Esperanto when he thought it the likely language of the future. “He didn’t just read books,” said a friend. “He ate them.”

He had a lovely voice and was often hired to sing at weddings. Much of his poetry described the beauties of nature. It was so good that Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, Georgia’s finest poet, published five poems by the impressive “young man with the burning eyes.” He grieved angrily over the poor and became convinced that God couldn’t exist or else there wouldn’t be so much suffering. To prove this revelation, he’d hand friends the work of Darwin. One early poem ended with a declaration that, if he just studied hard enough, he could help others in his native land. “While the joyful nightingale / With a gentle voice was saying -- / ‘Be full of blossom, oh lovely land / Rejoice Iverians’ country / And you oh Georgian, by studying / Bring joy to your motherland.’ ”

Even when he turned to crime, it was to fund what he believed a good cause -- ending the czar’s oppressive regime. A priest forced to smuggle 50 donkeys loaded with guns and ill-gotten money remembered that his coercer “impressed everyone. I even liked him -- he was restrained, serious, and decent.”

He was a tough kid, sure, but that was no surprise. He grew up in Gori, a Georgian city with a tradition of street fighting. His alcoholic father had been rough with him too, once thrashing him so hard that there was blood in his urine for days. But his mother pampered him and stood up for him, ensuring that one day he would be able to get out of Gori and leave his mark on the world.

Young Josef Djugashvili -- later Joseph Stalin -- did indeed end up doing that, and this mesmerizing biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Young Stalin,” explains his path. Montefiore already has written a book about the harrowing personal life of the general secretary in later years, “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.” This volume is the tale of struggle and conquest, starting with Gori and ending with the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The great mystery of Stalin’s early years has long been: How did this guy get to power? Historians have seen him as a marginally talented bureaucrat who didn’t play much of a role in the revolution. Montefiore emphatically demonstrates that Stalin was never mediocre. He was a dazzling ringleader and mastermind from his earliest days. During the revolution, he was Lenin’s principal protector, while furiously active in restoring the Bolsheviks’ printing presses after government troops smashed them. Historians have long been misled by Trotsky’s memoirs, which falsely relegate his historic rival, and eventual destroyer, to obscurity.

But in answering one question, Montefiore raises another one: Where did this guy go wrong?

If you read the first 100 pages with the names excised and the locations disguised, you might think you were following the early years of Pablo Neruda, or some other left-leaning Lothario poet. Another 100 pages and it seems to be the story of Butch Cassidy, a charming and likable rogue. Finishing the book, you still think there could be a chance at redemption. Yes, young Stalin has turned monstrous by the final pages. But a skilled scriptwriter could easily take this tale and create a redeemed hero for Volume 2, maybe someone like Malcolm X.

Obviously, there were many factors, but it seems that two main ones turned Anakin into Darth Vader. First, dark and lonely exile. As a young man, Stalin was a master of disguise. On a number of occasions, he escaped the czar’s secret police by dressing up as a woman. But eventually his luck would run out, and he would either be sent to prison or into exile, perhaps to a place where the temperature dropped to 50 degrees below zero. He’d always get away, but then he’d get busted and sent back.

Second, obsessive suspicion created by police infiltration of the Bolsheviks. If Stalin assumed that no one near him could be trusted, it’s because, almost from the outset, that was true. Montefiore notes that of the six Bolsheviks elected to the legislative imperial Duma in October 1912, two were spies for the czarist secret police, including Roman Malinovsky, a dear friend who ultimately betrayed Stalin by taking him to a ball where government agents were waiting. Soon, the Georgian firebrand was being transported to the Siberian wilderness. This is the exile that almost broke him: He nearly died of the cold and spent long weeks huddled in a little hut made of birch branches. The strange light patterns turned him nocturnal, a trait he would keep for the rest of his life. At the end of that exile, another friend asked Stalin what his greatest pleasure was. The response: “to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.”

No matter the causes, by the time of the takeover of Petrograd, young Djugashvili’s love of poetry had been overtaken by Stalin’s passion for blood and broken spirits -- a pleasure much indulged in over the next 36 years. It’s a dark and terrifying story, and there could be no better guide than Montefiore. He has uncovered a mind-blowing amount of material from archives in Russia and Georgia. If the narrative sometimes seems to sink into an endless cycle of exploit, arrest, exile, affair, escape, that’s just the way Stalin lived. The ultimate effect of “Young Stalin” is to create a haunting, meticulous and compelling story of a man well worth trying to understand.