The nature of the beast

Robert Service has set himself a formidable task. He has to explain how the son of a wife- beating, dirt-poor Georgian cobbler, brutalised by drink, became a Russian despot as ruthless as Ivan the Terrible. A master of his sources, which include the partially opened Soviet official archives, Service triumphs in portraying Stalin’s personality in the context of his times.

The career of Stalin would have been inconceivable had not his pious mother defied his father in order to give her son an education, including learning Russian, to prepare him for the priesthood. The young Stalin left the Orthodox church seminary at Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, a militant atheist and a committed Marxist to work in the Bolshevik underground in the Caucasus. It was the murky world of Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Exiled for four years to Siberia, he relieved the monotony of that frozen waste by fishing and seducing the 16-year-old daughter of his peasant host.