Volume 54, Number 17 · November 8, 2007
Rise of a Gangster
By Orlando Figes
Young Stalin
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Knopf, 460 pp., $30.00
'Stalin,' recalls the Menshevik politician Nikolai Sukhanov in his memoirs of the Russian Revolution of 1917, 'gave me the impression...of a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace. There is really nothing more to be said about him.'[1] Thanks to the writings of his more intellectual enemies, who deeply influenced the Western historiography of the early Soviet regime, we have come to see the young Stalin as a mediocrity, one of Lenin's loyal henchmen, who emerged from the darkest shadows of his Party to seize power in the Soviet Union.
Review, 3648 words
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