![]() ![]() Despite his small stature, for example, he gave and received physical beatings yet was an exceptional child in nearly every school subject. Much in the book runs against what was accepted in the West about his life for decades. The reader/listener gets an amazingly detailed account of Stalin the prodigy, teenaged poet, under-sized street fighter, angry seminary student reading Karl Marx, the quirky promiscuous rebel with multiple children born out of wedlock, the organizer of bank robberies and extortions to fund the revolution, the intellectual who read every book he got his hands on, and finally the indispensable (to Lenin anyway) behind-the-scenes political manipulator. Georgia was distant enough from Moscow that first person memoirs, letters, and documents survived destruction, setting in forgotten drawers. ![]() ![]() It is surprising so many details of Stalin's life as a young revolutionary survived the ordered destruction of his personal history. This is an excellent book, perhaps even better than Montefiore's In the Court of the Red Tsar. ![]()
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