[DEBATE] : Stalin review

[David McDonald]

An excellent review!  Montefiore's works on Stalin are impressive in their
detail, but his own bourgeois politics colour things to such an extent that
we fail to get a real sense of the extent to which
Marxist/communist/socialist ideologies (and the incredibly fragmented
left-wing politics of those times) shaped what Stalin did.  It's as though
Stalin were a demigod hovering above the politics of the time, giving us too
much of a Big Man overview of the Soviet regime.  

Does anyone know of a good, up-to-date biography of Stalin by a Marxist? 


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Subject: [DEBATE] : Stalin review

Friday 27 February 2009

An historian’s love/hate relationship with Uncle Joe

Simon Sebag Montefiore officially loathes the subject of his book, Joseph
Stalin. Yet secretly, he also seems to find him – and the early
revolutionary events he was involved in – entrancing and magnetic.

Guy Rundle 

The heist was exhaustively planned, but it nevertheless went awry. 

The bank would soon be swollen with cash for wages and other payments for
the thousands of workers in the filthy, dangerous oilfields that had turned
the city into a boomtown. Twenty ‘soldiers’ of the syndicate known as ‘The
Outfit’ were positioned in the square, outside the main branch of the bank,
waiting for the signal to be given by a couple of teenage gangster’s molls,
with guns hidden beneath their skirts. 

People milling around the market square could tell that something was up –
but there were plenty of horse-mounted cops to keep the peace. Yet, as the
money carriage thundered into town, the ‘cops’ surrounded and diverted it
down a side street, and the girls rolled four grenades underneath it. The
bombs blew horses and people to pieces, but not all of them, and the
gangster who had grabbed the sacks of money was surrounded – until the
gang’s second-in-command rode in, guns blazing, and ferried the cash to a
backstreet safe-house where it would be sewn into mattresses. 

The second-in-command was Kamo, a Bolshevik and gangster who would later
find fame for faking insanity for years at a time in order to avoid the
death penalty. The boss was, of course, Stalin, and the raid was the 1907
‘Tiflis (Tblisi) bank job’, famous in its day as a new low/high by ruthless
Russian revolutionaries. It’s an event that was buried in history for some
time – the official old left had expunged the more piratical methods from
official history, and the right had bigger fish to fry – but it opens Simon
Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin in cracking form, and sets the tone for the
whole book. 

Having had full access to Moscow and Georgian archives opened in the wake of
the Cold War, Montefiore has effected a staggering revision of the image of
Stalin (1878-1953) as the ‘grey blur’, the characterless bureaucrat who rose
without trace and hijacked the October revolution. 

The image, another cliché that both the right and left had an interest in
perpetuating, always looked dodgy, and Montefiore has rolled a hand grenade
under it. Poet, lover, gangster, reader, writer, but above all a
revolutionary, Joseph Djugashvilli was renowned long before he took the name
‘Steelman’ (both a Bolshevik superhero name – like Molotov, the ‘hammer’ –
and also borrowed from an ex-girlfriend), an identity he adopted in 1912.
Converted to revolutionary Marxism at an early age, he raged across the
Caucuses, Europe and Siberian exile, building a network that spread from the
most austere and precise Marxist intellectuals at one end through to
activists, unionists and gangsters at the other. He organised tirelessly,
imposed discipline with absolute ruthlessness, and kept the Bolshevik party
going with a series of bank-raid ‘expropriations’, all the while capable of
picking up a guitar and wooing a local girl with one of the Georgian poems
(’so lovely moon as before / glimmer through the clouds / pleasantly in the
azure vault...’) he had published under the name ‘Soselo’. 

But by the time he was famous enough for a biography, he was supreme leader
Uncle Joe, in the ill-fitting party tunic, and the bohemian milieu in which
he had once moved was an official enemy of the Party. The History of the
CPSU written under his direction, or by him, or both, was intended to make
the Bolsheviks/Communists look like a relentless and monolithic historical
force, doggedly building a working-class movement, and then striking
audaciously to infuse reality with reason, through revolution. Montefiore’s
determination is thoroughly to revise that picture with as much new
information as possible, while also avoiding easy psychologistic
explanations for Stalin’s ultimate paranoia, ruthlessness and sadism. The
result is a book that is by turns eye-popping, illuminating, irritating, and
ultimately as one-sided and unreflective a portrait as earlier works
canonising the party automaton. If nothing else, it is a study in authorial
ambivalence, a 400-page internal struggle by an author who has to pull
himself back, repeatedly, from a deep entrancement with a subject he
officially loathes. 

First, the good bits. Montefiore is a great pictorial writer, and he gives
one of the best accounts of late Tsarist Russia and the wider revolutionary
milieu in Europe. One crucial revision is that of the world in which
Djugashvilli came to adulthood: the oilfields region of the Black Sea coast
of Georgia. Far from being a drab monolithic peasant state, the place was in
upheaval, as money – largely from the Rothschild and Nobel families – flowed
in to create refinery facilities for the plentiful black stuff discovered in
the 1880s. 

Batumi, the port where the expelled ex-seminary student and pub-poet ‘Soso’
(Stalin’s childhood nickname) was brought up, was divided into instant slums
knee-deep in oil muck, and mansions built, Vegas-style, as literal copies of
French chateaux. From adolescence on, Soso, the son of a violent, abusive
cobbler and a doting mother, had shown a capacity for leadership, ferocious
intelligence, and a total lack of inhibition about using violence. The
secular reading that had got him thrown out of the seminary had led him to
Marxism by his late teens, and his bohemian rebelliousness appears to have
fused with a fervent belief that Marxism provided a true picture of the
world, and a guide to action. Already a talented organiser, in Batumi he
took a job with the Rothschild refinery, shortly before the warehouse he was
assigned to caught fire, which provoked a strike that broke the cosy
relationship whereby local police would prevent trade unionisation. This
early triumph was soon interrupted by arrest, and Soso/Stalin’s first
Siberian exile. 

>From there, it was two decades of politics, escape, violence, a couple of
marriages, and a string of affairs, culminating in the tumultuous events of
1917. Here, the book starts to pall, at least for anyone interested in more
than the picaresque. Montefiore is strong on the atmosphere of the European
revolutionary underground, but weak on the intellectual and political
currents driving these people to difficult and dangerous lives. Most
histories of the Russian Revolution err on the side of dryness – Bernstein,
the Menshevisk-Bolshevik split, the collapse of Second International, and so
on – but Montefiore has pushed these momentous events to the very limits of
his narrative, and never really draws them into the centre of the people’s
lives that he is writing about. 

By the third time that Soso had escaped from the cops, dressed in the
copious skirts of the tearful female he had promised to come back for, I was
desperate for some greater insight and discussion into the issues that the
Bolsheviks were debating. It is true that Stalin’s personal ruthlessness was
not matched by a theoretical fanaticism; during the Bolshevik doldrum period
of 1907-14, he was arguing vociferously for reunification with the
Mensheviks and was scathing of the wilder flights of debate about
‘God-building’ and empirio-criticism amongst the exiled Bolsheviks. Yet it
is not as if there is no record of his thoughts – most of Stalin’s life in
this period was taken up with writing and publishing, leading up to his
editorship of Pravda in 1917. Much of it is propaganda for immediate
consumption; but even this, if read in a certain way, can reveal certain
underlying attitudes, dispositions, approaches. Montefiore is better than
most on Stalin’s writings on nationalism, but this is the only work that
gets any sustained attention or interpretation. 

This is characteristic of the book’s limits as a whole – limits which most
critics, bamboozled by the phenomenally readable story, haven’t really
picked up on. Central to this is Montefiore’s lack of interest in exactly
why a violent individualist like Joseph Djugahsvilli would become a Marxist
in 1890s Georgia. It cannot have been self-interest or the will to personal
power; if that had been the case, he would have simply become a local
gangster, aiming for the faux-chateau on the hill above the oil slick. It
would be another two decades before the idea of permanent and uninterrupted
revolution, driving straight through bourgeois liberalism to socialism,
would become a plank of Russian Marxism – all that the party offered at the
close of the nineteenth century was the chance to nudge Russia to a
revolution that the bourgeoisie lacked the will to prosecute, with poverty,
imprisonment and death as a reward. 

These were the years when to choose Marxism over anarchism was to choose the
boring gradualist work of movement-building over the propaganda of the
terrorist deed. Stalin was more amenable to bank raids and the occasional
assassination than most, but a lot of his life was spent in an editor’s
chair, trying to find new words to say the same thing for the
nine-thousandth time, the expense of powers on the ‘flat ephemeral pamphlet’
as Auden had it. What is most interesting, and what Montefiore never
explores, is why this rogue, by turns ebullient and thuggish, would bend his
life to the small rewards and large frustrations of party work. 

That life decision makes no sense unless it is understood as a categorical
ethical act – as a refusal to accept the world as it is, and a determination
to change it. Montefiore, whose previous works have focused on Russian court
life, is good on the carnivalesque details of turn-of-the-century Georgian
life, the wrestling competitions and louche street life, but he can’t really
bring to life the world in which revolutionary Marxism came to be the
obvious and only answer for so many. 

This was, after all, the era of high imperialism, of the Belgian Congo, of
Chinese famines, of a European mining industry with a 10 per cent mortality
rate, of everywhere the streamlining of human commodification. An oil
boomtown would be a great lesson in that: fantastically unsafe drilling
operations essentially treated the worker as an extension of the drill-bit.
Coming out of the earth, the drill could whip chaotically, killing in an
instant. The workers’ slums were so crowded together that typhoid and
cholera ripped through them. Children lived and died, covered in tar. What
better lesson could there be that something had to be done? Montefiore is
one of the first biographers to make clear that Stalin grew up in a centre
of capitalism, rather than in some archaic Tolstoyan backwater, but he can’t
provide any meaningful insight into it. 

That failure, not of empathy but of interpretation (which is a more serious
defect), predisposes the book to a permanently unsettled attitude to its
subject. Thus we get a rambunctious account of the Batimu strike, which
ended in a police massacre, and Stalin’s subsequent exhilaration. Montefiore
writes: ‘“Today we advanced several years!” Stalin told Kachik Kazarian.
Nothing else mattered. “We lost comrades but we won.” As in many other
campaigns, the human cost was irrelevant, subordinate to its political
value.’ 

Thanks for that helpful observation, Sebag. This is the worst aspect of the
book, its repeated determination to sound like an anti-Communist B-movie
from the 1950s. This approach kicks in every time the authorial voice loses
itself in the material, and the danger looms that we may see things from
Stalin’s point of view, or become lost, as the author appears to sometimes
be, in the man’s obvious magnetism (according to a 2007 Daily Telegraph
profile, Montefiore – a child of East European exiles – was writing from the
age of 10 and his first work was a novel titled ‘I Was Stalin’s Lover’). 

The closer we get to the October revolution, the more this cautionary
attitude dominates the book. The portrayal of the revolution is a travesty,
the events being described as a ‘farce’. Though they were as chaotic as any
such action tends to be, farce usually describes a comic failure of action,
which the October revolution most certainly was not. But Montefiore’s
identification with the ancien Tsarist regime is so total that he simply
cannot bear to admit that the events of the October revolution were anything
other than a ‘coup’, even while he is dutifully noting that tens of
thousands of Bolshevik soldiers were advancing on Moscow. 

Montefiore usefully dispels the myth that Stalin essentially missed the
revolution, pointing out his key role as Pravda editor, at the same time as
he distorts Lenin’s famous quote about not wanting to listen to Beethoven
because it ‘makes you want to stroke the heads of people who can make such
hell in this world, when what you have to do is smash them’. Montefiore
leaves out the bit about ‘making hell in this world’, to make it look as if
Lenin gave up music because it interfered with random biffo. It’s a small
but telling moment where the responsible historian is overwhelmed by the
vengeful exiles’ child. 

Montefiore has written a much better book than June Chang’s Mao, where the
man who won China is assessed as having less personal qualities than, say,
Charlie Brown; but he has nevertheless been tempted away from real history
to play to the bien-pensant gallery of tut-tutting that passes for debate on
the politics of revolution these days. In several ways, the book is
indispensable; for example, it has the most authoritative account yet of
charges that Stalin was an agent for the Ohkrana (it dismisses these
charges). And it avoids the penny-psychoanalysis of Alan Bullock’s dual
biographies of Stalin and Hitler (violent alcoholic fathers, doting mothers,
etc). Yet it cannot help but read back the Gulag into every time Stalin was
a bit of a jerk to his girlfriend. Which leaves the question – is this
authorial voice so insistent because the facts are so obviously appalling,
or because they aren’t? Is the old-retainer author conscious that the young
revolutionary’s determination and resolve, so expertly conveyed, may act not
as cautionary tale, but as an inspiration to some? That whatever Stalin may
have become – a dictator who crushed dissent – there was something valuable
in the earlier revolutionary stirrings that swept up this young Georgian and
so many others? 

Guy Rundle is an Arena (Australia) Publications Editor and the author of
Down to the Crossroads: On the Trail of the 2008 US Election. (Buy this book
from Amazon(UK).) 

Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore is published by Phoenix. (Buy this
book from Amazon(UK).)