I love Iosif Stalin. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to write about Iosif Stalin. Not even Stalin himself knew how to write about Stalin, though he knew that Stalin the Figure was not Stalin the Person and behaved accordingly. In terms of the person, he left no diary or journal for his innermost thoughts, his personal letters were carefully guarded, and he was generally not one to doubt himself or write about doubting himself. Into this hole has flooded a deluge of words about Stalin’s personality and psychological makeup, like the nonsense spouted first prominently by Trotsky and Khruschev, and then remixed in a thousand variations by the liberal academic publishing complex. Needless to say, there are abundant biographies about Stalin, and few of them are serious and even fewer are good.

Most of the English-language biographies are on the level of Sebag-Montefiore’s orientalist Young Adult historical adventure fiction.¹ In terms of serious study, Stalin’s tenure in the USSR has gotten a better shake than the man himself, with the rise of the revisionist school of Sovietology in radical liberal academia (surprisingly, one man did not have absolute power over an entire society!).² And even from the Communist side, historical biographies of Stalin published during his rule took care to buff out his sharp points and polish his face smooth — as much as Stalin himself did not enjoy it, he resigned himself to becoming an idol for his people.³ Post-de-Stalinization defenders like Domenico Losurdo and Ludo Martens are much more concerned with Stalin and the USSR more broadly, than they are with the man himself, as a person.

Who the hell was Stalin? No one knows, I’m afraid. But there might be a good guess.

In 1987, Ronald Grigor Suny set out to write another Stalin biography to add to the pile of Stalin biographies in the world. It took him until 2020 to finish the project, as the Soviet Union collapsed in the interim. But besides the unpleasant fact of the capitalist holocaust, this cracked the former government’s archives open to Western scrutiny. Dr. Suny had a field day, digging through pretty much all documentary materials available on Stalin’s pre-revolution life, and produced a 896-page tome of Stalin’s life before the October Revolution. Good for him! He was lauded and attacked for his book, by the peanut gallery of respectable socialists and rabid anti-Communist dogs.⁴

Move over, Stephen Kotkin. Suny’s on the scene!

Suny’s book, based on his excessive archival trawling, makes the argument that the young Stalin can be divided into three phases of his life: Soso, the faithful seminarian, is not Koba, the unseasoned rebel, is not Stalin, the Marxist professional revolutionary. Suny, unlike pretty much every other Stalin biographer, actually has a wide breadth and depth of knowledge of the revolutionary Caucasus, which he exercises to great effect, filling pages on the nuances of Georgian Social Democracy and the various environments that Soso, then Koba, then finally Stalin moved through. He lays out in fine-grained detail how those environments shaped Stalin’s development, his personality, his preferences, and ultimately the man who would be the Stalin we all know and love (or hate) and how Stalin in turn impacted Georgian and Russian Social Democracy as an activist-organizer-revolutionary. How dialectical!

I imagine the book will be tedious for the reader who just wants to know what hijinks our buddy Koba is getting up to next. As an avid hoarder of facts, I really enjoyed those tangents on politics and culture. As distant as the Tsarist-Russian revolutionary milieu seems to us today, filtered through time and historical mythology, it is helpful to remember that these were ultimately just people trying to figure out how to win against their oppressors and then build the first long-lasting socialist experiment in human history. In other words, they had their own version of inane discourse and difficult personalities. The young Koba, too overconfident, kind of an asshole and schemer, is either relatable because you’ve been a Koba or you’ve had to deal with a Koba.

Though Suny is hostile to the later Stalin in power, he treats the young Stalin with a rare amount of care and empathy. Stalin’s personal life (or, whatever existed of a personal life for a professional revolutionary) is elaborated based on actual documentary evidence instead of the sensationalist rumor-mongering that Stalin biographers often indulge in and the real friendships that Stalin had at the time are named for what they were, even if they later ended very badly.

Where the book is weakest is towards its end, where Suny forecloses Stalin’s trajectory into the revolution eating its children, typical of academic petit-bourgeois pessimism. Trillions starved, etc. But arguably what is most valuable about this book is less than what it details about specifically Stalin’s early activities and personal development, but much more about what it details, through those long tangential passages, about the revolutionary Tsarist-Russian underground, about the cruel reality and life-or-death stakes of fighting an autocratic regime in a peripheral region of a reactionary empire, the nagging national question and the various ways that Communists reconciled (or didn’t) with national liberation, and yes, what it details about the nuances of party-building in Tsarist Russia and its borderlands. Suny commentates from outside these internal splits and dynamics within Russian Social Democracy with more than a century of ironic hindsight, but these are debates that the revolutionaries took seriously at the time and so does he. And so should we.

It would be preposterous to suggest that Tsarist Russia is a mirror of the modern day US Empire– and yet, the challenge remains the same for all Communists: how do we build the party to seize power from the bourgeois state? After all, if the particular characteristic of Tsarist Russia was the autocracy, then the particular characteristic of the US Empire is settler-colonialism, a kind of decentralized autocracy. Perhaps Stalin’s experiences in the underground organizing reading circles with students and workers, his brief stint with legal union organizing, his leadership of armed militias during the height of reaction, his activities as a Bolshevik traveling agent always one step ahead of the Okhrana, and finally his role as a tribune of the people in the interim between February and October provide a clue as to what Communists should expect from their work as the US Empire crumbles. Perhaps we should have a closer look at what it actually took to sustain an underground network and an aboveground movement and draw appropriate lessons from it for today, while keeping in mind that our adversaries are just as well-studied as we are.

In lieu of a numerical rating, I’ll tell you who I think should read this book: Baby Communists who only know the myths of anti-Stalin, obsessive enthusiasts of Soviet revolutionary history, active Communists engaged in the hardest questions of national liberation, and anyone who’s read any other biography about Stalin at all.

1. The clearest example of this is his Young Stalin (2007). This critique of Montefiore can be found almost verbatim in the pages of another of the Big Stalin Biographies, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin. ︎
2. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously is a group biography that argues that the functional dynamic of the top Stalinist leadership was as a team. Stalin was the team leader who delegated responsibilities and had final word on team inclusion or exclusion, but relied on the loyalty and agency of his teammates to carry out day-to-day governance. Stalin’s team did not mindlessly bend to his will; he had to argue his case convincingly and rely on a combination of argument and intrigue to get his team members on board with certain strategies or tactics. ︎
3. Briefly, for more on this, there are these two letters: (1925) and (1938). ︎
4. Funnily enough, Suny wrote about the reception that his book got in third person about himself. ︎