Under Freud’s influence, many ambitious biographers—not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians—have sought answers in their subject’s childhood. Just as Hitler’s fanaticism has been “explained” by his upbringing, his sex life, or his alleged single testicle, so has Stalin’s psychopathic cruelty been attributed to the father who, in Stalin’s own words, “thrashed him mercilessly,” or to the mother who may have had an affair with a local priest. Other accounts have featured the accident that left Stalin with a withered arm, the smallpox infection that badly scarred his face, or the birth defect that joined two of his toes and gave him a webbed left foot—the mark of the devil.
Politics have influenced Stalin’s biographers too. During his lifetime, sympathizers made him into a superhero, but opponents have imposed their prejudices as well. Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward. Trotsky’s Stalin was lacking in wit and gaiety, an unlettered and provincial man who obtained power through bureaucratic manipulation and brute violence. Above all, Trotsky’s Stalin was a turncoat who betrayed first Lenin and then the Marxist cause. It was a portrait that served a purpose, inspiring Trotskyites to remain faithful to the Soviet revolution that “could have been”—if only Trotsky had come to power instead of the gray, guarded, cynical Stalin.
Since the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s, these politicized and psychologized accounts of Stalin’s life have begun to unravel. Politics still influence how he is publicly remembered: in recent years, Russian leaders have played down Stalin’s crimes against his own people, while celebrating his military conquest of Europe. But the availability of thousands of once-secret documents and previously hidden caches of memoirs and letters has made it possible for serious historians to write the more interesting truth. Drawing on contacts in Tbilisi and Moscow for his Young Stalin, the historian and journalist Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, offers a portrait of the dictator as a youthful rabble-rouser, Lothario, poet, and pamphleteer—hardly the lumpen bureaucrat of Trotsky’s imagination. Digging deep and long in obscure archival collections, the Russian academic Oleg Khlevniuk has produced marvelously detailed accounts of the incremental evolution of the Soviet Communist Party from the chaos of the revolution into what eventually became Stalinism. Khlevniuk’s books—alongside the edited letters of Stalin to two of his sidekicks, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, and dozens of published documents on the history of the Gulag, of collectivization, of the Ukrainian famine, of the KGB—show that Stalin did not create the Soviet dictatorship through mere trickery. Nor did he do it alone. He was helped by a close circle of equally dedicated men, as well as thousands of fanatical secret policemen.
In an exceptionally ambitious biography—the first volume of a projected three takes us from Stalin’s birth, in 1878, up to 1928 in just under 1,000 pages—Stephen Kotkin, a history professor at Princeton, sets out to synthesize the work of these and hundreds of other scholars. His goal in Stalin is to sweep the cobwebs and the mythology out of Soviet historiography forever. He dismisses the Freudians right away, arguing that nothing about Stalin’s early life was particularly unusual for a man of his age and background. Sergei Kirov, a member of Stalin’s inner circle, grew up in an orphanage after his alcoholic father abandoned the family and his mother died of tuberculosis. Grigory Ordzhonikidze, another crony, had lost both his parents by the time he was 10. The young Stalin, by contrast, had a mother who, despite her background, was ambitious and energetic, mobilizing her extended family on her talented son’s behalf.
More important, Kotkin notes, young Stalin stood out in late-19th-century Tiflis not because he was especially thuggish but because he was a remarkable student. By the age of 16, he had made his way into the Tiflis seminary, the “highest rung of the educational ladder in the Caucasus … a stepping-stone to a university elsewhere in the empire.” He eventually dropped out of school, drifting into the shadowy world of far-left politics, but remained a charismatic personality. In Baku, where he went in 1907 to agitate among the oil workers, he engaged in “hostage taking for ransom, protection rackets, piracy,” as well as the odd political assassination. He moved in and out of prison, showing a special facility for dramatic escapes and adopting a wide range of aliases and disguises.
Slowly, Kotkin builds the case for quite a different interpretation of Stalin—and for quite a few other things, too. The book’s signature achievement, and its main fault, is its vast scope: Kotkin has set out to write not only the definitive life of Stalin but also the definitive history of the collapse of the Russian empire and the creation of the new Soviet empire in its place. His canvas is crowded with details from the lives of Bismarck and Mussolini, as well as the czarist politicians Sergei Witte, Pyotor Stolypin, and Pyotor Durnovo; the czar and the czarina themselves; and of course Lenin, Trotsky, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Nikolai Bukharin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, just for starters.
Year by year, crisis by crisis, a fine-grained picture of Stalin’s intellectual development nevertheless emerges. It is easy to forget, but on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late 30s and had nothing to show for his life. He had “no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry,” meaning that he wrote articles for illegal newspapers. He certainly had no training in statecraft, and no experience managing anything at all. The Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917 brought him and his comrades their first, glorious taste of success. Their unlikely revolution—the result of Lenin’s high-risk gambles—validated their obscure and fanatical ideology. More to the point, it brought them personal security, fame, and power they had never before known.