Stalin

Passage to Revolution

Ronald Grigor Suny

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691202716, 9780691182032
• eBook ISBN: 9780691185934
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A spellbinding new biography of Stalin in his formative years

This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators.

In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin's early years in the Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged with some of the most incendiary debates of his time.

A landmark achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: FORTUNE’S NAVE

1. 1. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence, ed. and trans. Charles Malamuth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941; paperback edition: New York: Grosset & Dunlap, no date), pp. 392–393.
2. 2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervom (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); The First Circle, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Vasilii Grossman, Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1988); Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). See also Anatolii Rybakov, Deti Arbata (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987); Children of the Arbat, trans. Howard Shukman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1988).
3. 3. One of the first psychoanalytic discussions of Stalin was by Gustav Bychowski, “Joseph V. Stalin: Paranoia and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in Benjamin B. Wolman (ed.), The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History (New York and London: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 115–149. For the theory that Stalin was a police agent before the revolution, see Isaac Don Levine, Stalin’s Great Secret (New York: Coward-McCann, 1956); Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967); and H. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History of a Dictator (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972). For a fuller discussion of psychohistorical and other approaches to Stalin, see Ronald Grigor Suny, “Making Sense of Stalin: Some Recent and Not-So-Recent Biographies,” Russian History, XVI, 2–4 (1989), pp. 435–448; expanded as “Making Sense of Stalin: His Biographers,” in Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment (London and New York: Verso Books, 2020); and the historiographical appendix to this volume, “Historians Look at Stalin: A Historiographical Discussion.”
4. 4. I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicishekoi literatury, 1946–1952), XIII, p. 113.
5. 5. For an account that emphasizes the centrality of an essentialized Georgian identity, particularly its purported romanticism and chronic violence, to Stalin’s formation, see Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 11.

CHAPTER 1. THE GEORGIAN

1. 1. The Hungarian historian Miklós Kun gives the birth date for Keke Geladze as February 5, 1860, based on the archival record of her death on June 4, 1937, in the former archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. [Miklós Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2003), p. 35; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1549]; Aleksandr Ostrovskii gives the date 1856 for her birth, which he took from the obituary in Zaria vostoka, June 8, 1937 [A. Ostrovskii, Kto stoial za spinoi Stalina (Saint Petersburg: Neva; Moscow: OLMA-PRESSA, 2002), p. 88]. This valuable work is a close review of archival materials on Stalin’s early life, primarily organized to show that he was not a police agent. Much of the material in Ostrovskii comes from his research in the Georgian party archives in Tbilisi [SShSSA] and the Stalin Museum in Gori [SSM], where he read through Russian-language memoirs of people who knew the young Stalin and his family. Soviet archivists collected dozens of memoirs of young Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s, only a few of which have been published. While such sources must always be approached with caution and a few are suspect in their schematic and hagiographic character, many others contribute details and stories that are corroborated in other sources and appear to this researcher to be reliable.
2. 2. SShSA, f. 440, op. 2, d. 38, l. 12; I. Kitaev, L. Moshkov, and A. Chernev, “Kogda rodilsia I. V. Stalin,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 11 (310) (November 1990), pp. 132–134; Edvard Radzinskii, Stalin (Moscow: Vagrius, 1997), pp. 17–18 [translation: Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, trans. H. T. Willets (New York: Doubleday, 1996); references will be from the English translation unless otherwise noted]. In her collection of documents on the young Stalin, archivist Ol’ga Edel’man demonstrates that Stalin was aware of the true date of his birth. [Ol’ga Edel’man, Stalin: Biografiia v dokumentakh (unpublished manuscript), p. 2; page numbers in my citations refer to the manuscript that Ms. Edel’man allowed me to read and cite before the actual publication, which occurred too late for inclusion here.]
3. 3. From a conversation between Edvard Radzinskii and Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, the playwright’s widow, cited in Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 11.
4. 4. Joseph Iremaschwili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens: Erinnerungen (Berlin: Verfasser, 1932); V. Kaminskii a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Dating and Spelling
• A Note on Archives
• Maps
• Introduction: Fortune’s Knave
• Growing Up Georgian
• Breaking Left
• The Making of a Bolshevik
• Revolutionary Underground
• Staying the Course
• From Outside In
• The Steep Path to Power
• Conclusion: The Road Traveled
• Historians Look at Stalin: A Historiographical Discussion
• Notes
• Index