Stalin by Ronald Grigor Suny
/Stalin: Passage to Revolution
By Ronald Grigor Suny
Princeton University Press, 2020
Twenty years ago there appeared in the journal Russian History an article titled “Making Sense of Stalin: Some Recent and Not-So-Recent Biographies” by history professor Ronald Grigor Suny. A version of that same article also appears in Suny’s 2020 book Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment. And a third version now forms the final chapter in Suny’s 800-page new biography of young Stalin, Stalin: Passage to Revolution - making clear that in addition to devoting enormous amounts of time and energy to studying Soviet history, Suny has also spent a lot of time studying historians of Soviet history.
In the case of Stalin: Passage to Revolution, readers may have a particular interest in that second concentration, mainly because even the most intrepid among them may balk at the prospect of spending yet another 800 pages with the same sloe-eyed psychopath who’s already occupied an army of biographers over the course of millions of pages. It was only six years ago, to pick a recent example, when Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Paradoxes of Power was published at nearly 1000 pages covering the same period Suny covers here: the birth, boyhood, and adolescence of nervy little Soso Jughashvili in his Georgian origins, his clashes with the law and imprisonment, his fanatical embrace of Marxism, his Siberian exiles, his gradual emergence as Lenin’s successor. Why, a beleaguered reader might ask, should I resign myself to spending a dreary autumn week in the company of that young Stalin again?
Suny’s answer is as measured as he can make it: “The prerevolutionary Stalin is only lightly sketched in Kotkin’s breezy run through his first thirty years,” he writes. “Abjuring Freudian analysis and explicitly avoiding relating the mature Stalin to his upbringing, the author leaves the reader with a richness of context but a thinness of explanation of how Jughashvili grew into Stalin.”
Anybody still bearing the psychic scars of slogging through Kotkin’s relentless (albeit brilliant) book will likely choke-sputter on that word “breezy,” but in any case the question stands, and it’s an odd one to ask about anything as massively researched and lovingly presented as Suny’s book: is another huge biography of Young Stalin actually necessary? Before his exile to Siberia in 1903, Stalin was a semi-intellectual hyper-energetic Angry Young Man; after his escape in 1904, he was the near-brainless homicidal automaton who would go on to betray every alliance, kill every friend, and commit mass murder on a scale unequaled by any single human being in the history of the world.
The precise anatomy of the alchemy - Suny refers to it as “the problem of Stalin” - always has and always will baffle historical inquiry, and the Stalin on one side of that alchemy is irrelevant to the Stalin on the other: Stalin the seminary student would have been horrified at the intent and extent of the Gulag, and Stalin the dictator would have found the idea of arguing with your enemies instead of killing them incomprehensible.
Suny’s account of those early years is tremendously heartfelt and psychologically knowing. The portraits here especially of Stalin’s drunken, hapless, and yet oddly compelling father and his redoubtable mother are sharply drawn, as is the network of dreamers and intellectuals and hangers-on with which Stalin surrounded himself back in the years when he cared about things other than murder. And throughout the book, Suny regularly reverts to the bigger canvas of ideas and movements, always in evocatively straightforward prose:
Whatever the desires and conceptions of professional revolutionaries, the revolution had a life of its own. People who in an earlier life had been the subjects of others now were actors in their own right. Workers marched for the eight-hour day and respectful address, and industrialists reluctantly gave in to their demands. Soldiers longed for an end to the war and to return home where they expected to obtain land. Exhausted by battle, they were prepared to fight for Russia, to defend the country, but were reluctant to launch an attack. As patriots, however, they hoped for victory. They resented the workers who wanted to limit their working day while soldiers were on duty all the time.
“Historians are great advocates of context - temporal and spatial, cultural and social,” Suny writes, “along with the other four ‘cons’ of historical writing: contingency, conjuncture, contradiction, and, yes, confusion.” For better or worse, readers of Stalin: Passage to Revolution will encounter all of these “cons” in heaping profusion. The Stalin who emerges from these pages is a black hole behind a sardonic smile, a tireless schemer and plotter working industriously around the peripheries of bigger and better thinkers, a functionary with barely-concealed dreams of empire. True to Suny’s implications, he is indeed a substantially different Stalin from the one in Kotkin’s book, although not one bit more relatable or less detestable. Readers in 2020 who are perhaps a bit weary of sociopathic autocrats will have to decide accordingly whether this particular Young Stalin is worth the ordeal.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.