Stalin as a young man was a gangster and a skirt-chaser – and when nobody else was available, he did not hesitate to seduce girls below the legal age of consent. He also wrote poetry. He read voraciously, admiring the Georgian classics and Anton Chekhov as well as Karl Marx. Joining the Bolsheviks, he made up his own mind about their policies. Among the extraordinary figures in turn-of-the-century Russian Marxism, he was one of the few who never emigrated before the first world war.

Usually it is the second half of Stalin’s life that has been under the spotlight, and this is hardly surprising. He was a leading Bolshevik in their October 1917 seizure of power. Volatile and ambitious, he subsequently fell out so badly with Lenin that he would have lost office if Lenin had not fallen ill and died in 1924. Stalin guided the Communist party into a campaign for industrialisation at the end of that decade. He turned on almost the entire Soviet elite in the great terror of 1937-38. His name became synonymous with economic expansion, cultural transformation and mass violence. After the defeat of the Third Reich, he incarnated the victorious USSR in the world’s imagination.

Stalin used lethal methods to control what was written about him. He disliked any inquisitiveness about his early years. He was wary of any emphasis on his being a Georgian rather than a Russian. He hated stories about the disrespect shown to him while he strove to rise in the Bolshevik faction before the first world war. He was far from eager for anyone to know of his persistent unorthodoxy as a Leninist. He shared his party’s aversion to revealing intimate details of personal affairs – his schooling, first marriage and his extramarital love life. He was acutely sensitive about people who remembered the many sordid episodes of his career; and many such individuals disappeared behind the barbed wire of the gulag.

Simon Sebag Montefiore qualifies for the veteran-of-labour medal with his new book. He has a big guiding purpose. Without adopting a particular psychological school of thought for guidance, he argues (and I strongly agree with this) that those early years tell us a lot about the momentous second half of a murderous life. He goes on to propose that the key to understanding Stalin in the 1930s lies especially in the gangster activities of the early 1900s.

A lot of this has been said before but not in such detail. As a former correspondent in the Caucasus, the ebullient Montefiore has the skills and contacts to secure his access to rare archives. He is a good listener and has traversed Georgia and Abkhazia interviewing the surviving members of families that had contact with Stalin. He communicates his affinity for Georgians and Georgian culture. British visitors have described the people and the life as being typically Mediterranean. What they really mean is that this small corner of the Russian empire reminds them of places like Naples. (The Baedeker of Russia for 1914 got this brilliantly right.) Tbilisi, the capital, was proud of its literature, music and architecture. Under the skin of this splendour throbbed the musculations of crime and antigovernmental resistance. The central regime in St Petersburg was thankful that Georgians disagreed among themselves as much as they did with the tsar.

Stalin, born in 1878, was a maladjusted child from an impoverished Georgian family. The unpleasant side of his character was evident to his schoolfriends in the street gangs of his home town Gori. He fought hard and dirty. Leaving home as a youngster, he was prickly towards his fellow trainee priests in Tbilisi. After he abandoned his ecclesiastical vocation, he soon annoyed comrades among the Georgian Marxists, taking offence when they failed to take up his ideas or acknowledge him as their leader.

The book’s opening scene is the Tbilisi armed robbery of June 1907. This shows the author at his best. Stalin, hiding behind the scenes, was the organiser. Several Georgian revolutionaries of diverse political stripe organised groups to steal from banks and extort funds from industrialists. Such groups operated in friendly rivalry from Tbilisi’s back alleys and the Bolshevik heist in Georgia’s capital was more spectacular than any other. The robbers, dressed in stolen official uniforms, killed or wounded the guards before grabbing the crates of paper roubles. Stalin sped north to Finland with the proceeds and replenished the faction’s exchequer. Unfortunately for the Bolsheviks, the authorities immediately published the serial numbers and arrests followed. What is more, the party as a whole denounced bank robberies for covering it in scandal. Thus Stalin won little renown for his feat; he kept quiet about it for the rest of his life.

The author argues that it should have come as no surprise that the Bolsheviks behaved liked gangsters after the October Revolution. He is right. But not all Bolsheviks operated criminally and immorally before 1917. Plenty of Bolsheviks and other Marxists at the turn of the century talked about the desirability of a class dictatorship. Few of them were literalists. It took the revolution and the ensuing civil war to show how much Lenin and Trotsky, as well as Stalin, exulted in terror. Most Bolsheviks, though, had expected to rule alongside the other socialist parties rather than to install a one-party despotism. After they seized power, they too came to endorse terrorist lawlessness. How and why they moved from rhetoric to practice requires further work on the collective ideological development of Bolshevism.

What Montefiore gives us is a richly and fluently documented study of the chief terrorist in the making. His chapters have an anecdotal exuberance and factual novelty. At the same time, he focuses the lens of his microscope over the blood-coloured fungus that grew from the spores of Stalin’s career. It is an impressive work of examination.

YOUNG STALIN by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Weidenfeld £25 pp432

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