Each of the sections in Sebag Montefiore's brilliantly readable history of Stalin's life before the October Revolution begins with a poem. This isn't unusual or even unexpected. Plenty of books plunder poetry for their epigraphs. What is surprising is that the author of these romantic, nature-worshipping verses was the young Stalin himself.

In his teens and twenties, Stalin was recognised in his native Georgia as a promising poet; indeed, Sebag Montefiore suggests that a comrade in one of the acts of terrorism and bank robbery that also kept Stalin busy at the time decided to join him in his revolutionary adventures largely because he was an admirer of his poetry. Poet and terrorist were only two of the many roles that the Georgian played before the revolution allowed his particular talents to flourish on a larger stage. He was also briefly a student priest at a seminary, a pirate on the Black Sea, a revolutionary journalist and a Bolshevik organiser of strikes and demonstrations. He was a promiscuous womaniser, leaving a trail of discarded mistresses and abandoned children, including a Siberian son, who was the result of a liaison with a teenager during one of his regular spells in exile.

He was a husband, too, although not a particularly good one. His neglected first wife died in her early twenties, and, even at her funeral, Stalin's attention was elsewhere. He was obliged to leg it over the cemetery wall to avoid arrest by the tsar's secret police. Sebag Montefiore's re-creation of the world in which his subject's picaresque career unfolded is wonderfully detailed and convincing, and the portrait he paints of an egotistical monster in the making is unforgettable

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix £9.99

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