For his biography Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Montefiore won deserved praise. Dealing with Stalin's formative years and inexorable rise to despotism, this is a prequel to that. It shares with its predecessor the virtues of fine prose, empathy with a rich range of characters and narrative of great vitality. Montefiore shows a special understanding of the Russian bent towards what he calls “minuscule oligarchy” that, under Putin, remains as evident today as it was under tsars white or red.

What is new here is the material. Papers pertaining to Stalin's youth in his native Georgia have become available only recently. Montefiore has diligently researched them. He has also travelled widely and interviewed people who knew Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili before he took up the pseudonym Stalin - “made of steel” - and went on to murder on a scale matched only by Hitler.

In Montefiore's hands we see a terrible evil born. Stalin was horribly brutalised as a child by his alcoholic father. Solipsism was his (understandable) response. He learnt to adapt, to dissemble - and to survive. Highly intelligent, he developed a “thoughtful and diligent autodidactic fervour, well concealed under the crude manners of a brutal peasant, that his opponents such as Trotsky ignored at their peril”. Montefiore shows how Stalin passed from choirboy to poet to gangster to commissar to tyrant - and the rest, as they say, is history.

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag
Phoenix, £9.99 Buy the book here

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