There is a peculiarly chilling quality to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin. The book is a fascinating prequel to his previous volume, Stalin: Court of the Red Czar. It reveals Stalin’s background as the much beaten child of a violent alcoholic shoemaker father and a laundress mother who did not hesitate to use her sexual attractions to further her bright little boy’s career.

Stalin grew up writing poetry of disconcerting tenderness, and some of his seminarist teachers thought he would make a fine priest. But his reading graduated to Marx and other revolutionaries. Montefiore describes Stalin’s role in the Russian Revolution with a vivid sense of scene that is transformed into aural theatre by Sean Barratt’s sensitively varied delivery.

We gatecrash meetings and eavesdrop on a remarkable number of amorous encounters. Stalin needed the warmth of a woman’s admiration to speed him towards his destiny.

But it is the route he chose to finance that destiny that chills, with its sinister echo of the methods now used in the streets of Baghdad – robbing banks, planting bombs, organising terrorist attacks, kidnapping wealthy people’s children for ransom, demanding protection money from foreign traders and financiers. It worked. Stalin remains horribly relevant for a modern revolutionary.

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Orion, CDs, £14.99

Buy the audiobook here at the offer price of £13.49 with free p&p timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist