Stalin: Passage to Revolution

by Ronald Grigor Suny

Overview

A spellbinding new biography of Stalin in his formative years

This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators.

In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin's early years in the Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged with some of the most incendiary debates of his time.

A landmark achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691202716
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2022
Pages:	912
Sales rank:	1,061,611
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and professor emeritus of political science and history at the University of Chicago. His many books include "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton) and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

A Note on Dating and Spelling xv

A Note on Archives xvii

Maps xix

Introduction: Fortune's Knave 1

Growing Up Georgian

1 The Georgian 11

2 The Pupil 31

3 Koba 49

Breaking Left

4 Apprentice of the Revolution 75

5 Burning Bridges 95

6 The Outlaw 116

7 Trial by Fire 146

The Making of a Bolshevik

8 On the Margins 177

9 Becoming Bolshevik 193

10 Back in the Game 212

Revolutionary Underground

11 Revolutionary Baptism 229

12 The Committeeman 250

13 The Terrorist 271

14 Meeting the Mountain Eagle 291

15 Gendarme of the Revolution 305

16 The Professional 333

Staying the Course

17 The Tiflis "Ex" 361

18 Journeyman for the Revolution 374

19 The Rebel Disarmed 404

20 Labor and Liquidators 428

From Outside In

21 The Roving Agent 455

22 The Man of Steel 481

23 The Expert 507

24 The Exile 537

25 Far from the Front 565

The Steep Path to Power

26 The Revolutionary 589

27 Reaping the Whirlwind 617

28 The Dark Before 642

29 On the Eve 662

Conclusion: The Road Traveled 688

Historians Look at Stalin: A Historiographical Discussion 697

Notes 707

Index 831

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Suny's focus on the young Stalin's life before the October Revolution is a brilliant strategy. The man who rose from obscurity in Georgia to a high position in Lenin's revolutionary party emerges that much more vividly, shaped by his times and circumstances yet convincing as an individual personality. Drawing on Suny's unique expertise in both Marxism and the history of the Caucasus, this illuminating book is destined to become a classic."—Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics

"A tremendous achievement. Suny provides the most comprehensive analysis of Stalin's early years in the Caucasus, a period crucial to his development as a revolutionary, and examines the multiple layers of experience that eventually made him into the man he was."—Stephen Jones, author of Georgia: A Political History since Independence

"The most informed, detailed, and analytically elegant account of how Stalin was tempered."—Yuri Slezkine, author of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

"A wonderful, pathbreaking book. More than anyone else, Suny has examined all the key sources, investigated all the key episodes involving Stalin directly or indirectly, and traced young Stalin's trajectory in all aspects of his life."—William Taubman, author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era and Gorbachev: His Life and Times

"Ronald Grigor Suny examines the formative years of the poorly educated Georgian seminarian who would become the leader of the Soviet Union through a chain of accidents and bring untold suffering to millions. Yet rather than offering a fatalistic vision of a Russia doomed to violence and authoritarianism, Suny brings to the surface human motivations and historical uncertainty."—Valery Tishkov, Russian Academy of Sciences

Editorial Reviews

Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, ASEEES

"Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize, Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn trust"

From the Publisher

12/04/2020

Suny (history, Univ. of Michigan; The Soviet Experiment) concludes this biography of Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) with the October Revolution in 1917, more than 35 years before Stalin's death. Initially, one may be wondering if readers need an additional biography of Stalin. However, this work provides an extraordinary account of elusive testimony as well as archival and interpretive material that nicely match its ambitious scope. Suny carefully blends casual episodes in Stalin's early life with the grand narrative of the Soviet Union in early 20th-century Russia. He clearly identifies the basis of Stalin's emergence from obscurity through the centrality of his place in 1917, dispelling the rumor that Stalin missed the revolution or that he had been a spy for the Okhrana, the Tsarist police. Historical records depict a morose and vengeful figure with a dislike of Jews and distrust of intellectuals. As Suny notes, Stalin is also a person of energy and persistence, and a "practiced performer" who, despite errors of judgment, emerges as consistently loyal to politician Vladimir Lenin. Suny explains Stalin's place in the Revolution and his tactical, strategic, and theoretical positions in Soviet history. VERDICT This impressively researched biography provides remarkable and reliable details on the first part of Stalin's life, along with the many fissures among the Left Communists. An important accomplishment.—Zachary Irwin, formerly with Penn State Behrend

Library Journal

★ 2020-07-16
A comprehensive, deeply researched study of one of the world’s most brutal dictators as he took the paths that would lead him to power.

Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was a frail boy who willed himself to improvement, physical and mental, with a program that Theodore Roosevelt would have recognized. He was remarkable, writes history professor Suny, but “at the same time quite ordinary, a small man placed in extraordinary circumstances.” Throughout his life, though, Stalin made efforts to excel at all he did, whether singing in a choir or writing poetry. “He was not above correcting his teachers,” Suny notes in his long but well-paced narrative. Without dipping too deeply into psychobiography, the author examines aspects of his home life that might have influenced his emergent defensiveness, and later paranoia, including a violent-tempered, alcoholic father and a mother who, though steely, encouraged her son to excel. Stalin left home for school in a larger city, moved into revolutionary circles that soon took him farther afield, and steadily rose in the ranks of Russian Marxists. Along the way, he used what Suny gently calls “dubious means” to consolidate his power as he aligned ever more closely with Lenin, who was in exile during much of the time that Stalin organized revolutionary activities in Moscow and Petrograd. Stalin was in exile, too, but almost immediately escaped from the remote Siberian town where he was sent. He helped engineer the Bolshevik victory over the post-czarist government and their Menshevik rivals. As Suny writes, “it was the more extreme picture sketched by the Bolsheviks—of the whole of propertied society, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries alike, as the enemy of the working class—that brought people out of the factories into the streets.” In all that effort—and in his clashes with fellow revolutionaries, notably Leon Trotsky—lay the seed for his later dictatorship.

A portrait of the totalitarian as a young artist, of great interest to any student of modern history.

Kirkus Reviews