Stalin – Passage to Revolution
by Ronald Grigor Suny,
Princeton Press £30.59

THE problem besetting any author writing about Stalin is set out plainly by Ronald Suny on page two of this enormous book. “The drama of his life, the achievements and tragedies, are so morally and emotionally charged that they challenge the usual practices of historical objectivity and scholarly neutrality.”

Stalin’s life, Suny writes, “is the story of the making of the Soviet Union and a particular vision of what he called socialism.” It is one of the most emotionally charged stories of the last century.  

The Italian historian of communism Aldo Agosti called it “the greatest paradox of the 20th century, the phenomenon of communism, capable of mobilising the hopes and energies of millions of human beings in the struggle for their own emancipation, and at the same time sacrificing the dignity and the lives of just as many.”

Stalin embodies the paradox more than any other figure. Some – indeed, most – of his biographers from Leon Trotsky onwards tend to resolve it not merely by painting their subject in the bleakest colours, but by using it as an exercise in establishing their own moral superiority.  

For example, Donald Rayfield, a rather less distinguished figure than Trotsky and author of the lurid Stalin and his Hangmen, criticised another Stalin biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, for allowing “the reader to forget for whole pages what an unremitting demon Stalin really was.”

Small enlightenment can be expected from such an approach. Happily, it is not Suny’s – although since his work focuses exclusively on Stalin in the years up to and including but not beyond the revolution of 1917, he does not have to address the crimes and controversies of Stalin in power.

But within that self-imposed limitation – and the text dealing with the young Stalin runs to more than 700 pages as it is – this is an outstanding work of scholarship. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that anything further needs to be written about this part of Stalin’s life in future.

Eschewing the sensationalist approach of Montefiore in his Young Stalin – basically, Stalin as womaniser – Suny sets the subject within every conceivable context: Russian state politics, life in the Caucasian borderlands, the emergent labour movement in Tblisi and Baku where Stalin first cut his revolutionary teeth, the political divisions within the Russian social democrats, the exhilarating advance and enervating ebb of revolution.

Suny is especially strong on the internal politics of the socialists, dealing exhaustively with the rift between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks both at the level of high theory and in terms of its impact on the ground, in the milieu where activists like Stalin operated.  

The differences in political perspective and about party organisation are rendered more comprehensible by this approach, rather than by referring exclusively to the classical Leninist texts. Suny has troubled himself to master these topics, something Montefiore and Rayfield would doubtless regard as a waste of time.

A vivid picture is painted of society and life in Stalin’s native Georgia, and adjacent Azerbaijan, of tsarist oppression and the elemental nature of the struggle of the embryonic working class. This was marked by violence, hideous exploitation and a continuing struggle for both personal survival and the preservation of any form of workers’ organisation.

This was the environment within which Stalin was forged. It was criss-crossed by fractures of nationality and religion. Suny details at some length Stalin’s emergence as an authority on the national question in the years before the revolution, laying down principles which profoundly shaped subsequent Soviet policy and, indeed, the worldwide Marxist approach to the question.

Inevitably, readers scour books about Stalin’s early years for clues as to what made him what he subsequently became. Suny does not set that as his explicit task, yet he leaves many clues. “In the Georgia in which he grew up violence was an everyday occurrence – in the family, from the state, against the state. There was arbitrary, unjustified violence... and violence sanctified by tradition,” he writes.

Likewise, he dwells on Stalin’s close friendship with Roman Malinovsky, the working-class Bolshevik leader subsequently unmasked as a tsarist spy. Such an experience doubtless made it easier in the years ahead to see the potential for treachery among close comrades, including where it did not exist.

“Chronically suspicious and prone to doubt others, Stalin learned a bitter lesson: traitors can be concealed within the ranks of the party itself.”

The coarsening and hardening effect of long passages of Siberian exile, scarred by privation, boredom and interminable squabbling, must have had an impact too.

None of this can explain the whole, though. Others had similar experiences yet were shaped differently. In some respects, Stalin emerges from this book as unremarkable. His discipline and aptitude as a practical worker clearly commended him to Lenin, who was repaid by the younger man’s unflinching political loyalty. There were better orators, writers and theorists but few who cleaved so close to the leader.

Stalin attached himself to Lenin politically early on and indeed regarded himself as a disciple of Lenin until the end of his life. In the pivotal year of 1917 he was staunchly “Leninist” at least after his wobble towards support for the provisional government in the aftermath of the February revolution and before Lenin’s return from exile.

While his role in the successful insurrection was clearly far inferior to that of Trotsky or Lenin, Stalin was by no means a secondary figure in the Bolshevik Party. Indeed, he had been added to the party’s central committee in 1912, when the body had only nine members. Lenin found his “wonderful Georgian” a reliable ally, in Suny’s telling.

Perhaps the overriding merit of this book is that it takes Stalin seriously. It explains his life and development without feeling the need to impose a value judgement on the reader on every page.

Of course, that would be harder if the story did not end in 1917. The best and worst was yet to come, and socialism still lives in its shadow. The last thirty-eight years of Stalin’s life deserve similar sober and scholarly treatment.