The World That Made Stalin — and the World That Stalin Made
Some aspects of Stalin’s life will always remain a mystery. But a fresh look at the Soviet dictator’s formative years can help us understand the rise and fall of the system he built.
Joseph Stalin in 1902. (Stalin Digital Archive / Wikimedia Commons)
It is the unhappy fate of a historian of the Soviet Union to have to deal with Stalin, and the fraught question of how the popular revolution that took place a dozen years before he achieved supreme power mutated from a vast movement for social and political emancipation into a murderous despotism. The Left has been saddled, hobbled, crippled by the legacy of Stalin and Stalinism. Liberals and conservatives constantly resurrect the dark years of his rule as proof of the true meaning and nature of socialism.
An effort to understand the specificities and complexities of Russia, its revolution and civil war, and the colossal transformation of a peasant society into an urban and industrial Great Power requires investments of time, energy, and curiosity, combined with much humility about what we know and can be expected to find out. But then that is what the writing of history is all about.
The Man Who Would Be Stalin
More than three decades ago, I turned from deep investigations of Georgian history to a serious study of Georgia’s most famous and notorious son, Ioseb Jughashvili, the man who became Stalin. There were already dozens of biographies of Stalin, and the need for another was disputable. But my interest was in his early life, his trajectory from the provincial town of Gori where he was born to the October Revolution.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.