Although less popular than tomes on Adolph Hitler, Iosif Stalin biographies have begun to close the gap. Since the second volume of Ian Kershaw's Hitler appeared in 2001, three western historians have reckoned with Stalin, from two bestselling volumes by Simon Sebag Montefiore in 2004 and 2007, to Stephen Kotkin's tomes on Stalin in 2014 and 2017 (a third is soon expected), to Ronald Grigor Suny's new Stalin: A Passage to Revolution.
Unlike Montefiore and Kotkin, Suny has chosen to confine himself to one volume on Stalin until 1917, aiming to give readers “an elucidation of his personal, psychological, and political formation,” to show “how he evolved into the confident, fearless rebel determined to lead” (8).
In this limited aim, Suny has succeeded. The author displays a nuanced grasp of the honor-and-slight obsessed Transcaucasian environment which nurtured the future dictator. Neither as flashy as Montefiore's swashbuckling Young Stalin nor as thoroughly contextualized as Kotkin's version, Suny's “Soso” is nonetheless a fully realized character. Sensitive and bookish, Soso was also a “skilled wrestler” and an avid boxer (32–33). Shy and withdrawn, Soso loved to sing in public—teachers called him “Nightingale” (45). His first real taste of revolutionary violence came when he urged striking workers in Batumi to sing aloud (157–58).
There are fascinating nuggets. Admiring the militancy of Muslim Chechens, Stalin named himself “Koba” after a mythical Georgian turncoat who joined the mid-nineteenth century ghazavat, or jihad, of Imam Shamil (66–67)—little suspecting that, four decades later, Shamil's grandson would declare jihad against Stalin, who would respond by mass-deporting Chechens (though Suny does not note the irony). Despite his love of brawling, Koba struggled to connect with workers because he was too effete and bookish: he did not smoke and drink like they did (108).
Suny ably recounts the factional struggles inside Russian Marxism, where Koba, known for the “rough justice” he “mete[d] out to those who endangered or betrayed the cause” (273), emerges as “one of the most steady and consistent Leninists,” “the most orthodox of Bolsheviks” (261, 269). In the revolution of 1905, Suny's Stalin was as much sectarian as street activist, boasting to hometown friends from Gori that his Bolshevik cell was “waging a brutal war with the Mensheviks”—not, that is, the tsarist regime (239). Stalin actually missed the bloodiest phase of the 1905 Revolution in Tiflis and Baku in order to pay homage to Lenin, the “mountain eagle” of Bolshevism, at a party congress in Finland (299–301).
So exhaustive is Suny's exploration of Marxist factionalism that he misses larger historical currents. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 is hardly mentioned, despite it providing the backdrop to the revolutionary struggle of 1905–7 which takes up six whole chapters (229–357). We are told, at one point (214), that Stalin offered a comrade the pseudonym “Togo,” after the Japanese admiral who destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima—an engagement nowhere else mentioned. The First World War, likewise, barely registers in the narrative. The entirety of the conflict merits a few cursory lines (570–71, 579), before Suny returns to Marxist doctrinal politics. No Russian battles or campaigns are discussed, not even the disastrous Kerensky offensive of 1917 that played such a pivotal role in the Revolution.
Suny's empathy with Stalin helps readers get inside the head of his protagonist, but it can also blind him to the obvious. In discussing the famous June 1907 armored heist in Tiflis, Suny takes issue with Montefiore's Young Stalin, arguing that Stalin was “peripheral to the robbery.” But the evidence Suny cites, Stalin's importuning of two postal clerks to glean intelligence about the “timing of the transport of postal funds” (365–66), is the same used by Montefiore to nail down Stalin's involvement. All Suny can say in Stalin's defense is that he “never personally took credit for the robbery”—a robbery which turned into a “poison pill” to the party because the stolen bank notes were marked and traced (367–68). Why would he have?
Suny's decision to end his massive tome “on the eve” of the October Revolution suggests that the author prefers to luxuriate in the years when Stalin and the Bolsheviks could dream of a Marxist utopia—rather than discuss the years they ruled Russia and murdered millions to build that utopia. While a defensible choice, the effect is at once jarring and deflating, like reading a sympathetic biography of Hitler that wraps up before the Beer Hall Putsch. Suny's study will prove a useful resource for scholars, but others may wonder, when do we get to the story?
