2 Books on Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 2007 394pp 18/10/16

Stalin was bornin 1878 in Gori Georgia. There are rumours as to who was his biological father. In 1907 he organized a bank robbery in Tiblisi for funds for Lenin revolutionaries. About 40 people were killed in it and the money was never recovered. We get a description of Georgia at that time which was a country with a lot of wine and priests. Stalin was sent to a high school meant for children of the priests and aristocrats and his mother had to work hard to pay for it. His father who had become estranged from his wife and an alcoholic wanted him to become a shoemaker. Tziblisi was a city where Georgian was a minority language to Russian, Armenian as well as Persian. At school they were forced to speak Russian. At 17 he published 5 poems in Georgian and he respected artists, he later didn’t execute them but Osip Mandelstam died in the Gulag while Pasternak and Shostakovich survived Stalin. He and his friend got hold of Victor Hugo's and Marx books which the Seminary was against them reading. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev was also on the list they objected to. Stalin went to Butami where the Rothschilds and Nobel(Swedish Nobel Prize family company) had oil pipes and a refinery and for the revolution set this on fire and caused trouble. This is a port city and the 2nd city of Georgia. Bulgakov was commissioned to write a play on the Batumi Incident which Stalin liked but didn't allow to be staged. Bulgakov wrote Master and Margarita as secret anti Stalin book before he died in 1940 published in 1966. Stalin was arrested and sent into exile 100 km from Irkutsk in Siberia, but escaped and returned. In 1905 Russia went to war against Japan and the failure caused the 1905 revolution which was a dress rehearsal for what was to come. That year saw the mutiny on the Potemkin battleship. When the Imperial Duma was announced Armenians has a pogrom against Azeris and 3000 Jews were slaughtered in pogroms that climaxed in Odessa Stalin was busy causing revolutions in Georgia and the Caucasus. In Chiatura the manganese mine owners paid him extortion to keep the peace and not burn their mines. The Tsar fought back by setting the Black Hundreds against the Jews and Socialist. At this stage Stalin went to Finland where Lenin was escaping the Tsars police, and a Bolshevik meeting was held there. With Stalin spoils, arms were bought and put on a ship the Zara some of the crew were from the Potemkin it sank in the black sea but the people were saved. Stalin really loved his wife Koba and had a son Yakov by her. She was left in Baku while he was working and died of typhus leaving him bereaved. After that Stalin worked full time for the revolution. Trotsky was also away from his wife most of the time. One of the reasons for his success is that he canvassed the illiterate Persian speakers and others. Chechen oil company guards beat him up badly and perhaps that is the reason that he later deported that population. In Baku donations from the oil companies or perhaps they were protection because later the Bolsheviks nationalized the oil companies. Soso was finally arrested and in prison he was the one in control. Sent into exile and returned. He was the Bolshevik security officer and it seems that they tipped him off with names that were loyal to the party in order to protect the Okhrana agents. The Okhrana (Tsar's secret police) never managed to stop the revolution but they managed to create havoc in the party and the Great Terror. Sverdlov was in exile with Stalin near Tomsk and they get on well and escape together. Swerdlov(a Jew) was considered the first secretary of the Communist party, he sent the telegram to murder the Tsars family. He died in 1918 at the age of 33 of the flu epidemic but rumors say he was murdered by anti-Semitic workers in Oryol but this was hushed. Maxim Gorky 1868 to 1936 a leading writer and communist ideologue possibly killed by Stalinist purges. Lenin’s famous work' What is to be done? Stalin’s famous work ' Marxism and the National Question.? During WW1 St. Petersburg sounded too Germanic was renamed Petrograd under the Tsar. Malinski was a person high up in the Bolshevik party and received one of the highest salaries from the Okhrana. Years later Stalin was convinced as a result that high up people in the party were traitors in the Great Terror period. In exile during WW1 he lived north of the arctic circle with Lapp tribesmen. and learned hunting, fishing, as well as handling sled dogs and the terror of wolves. When the revolution occurred Stalin returned immediately to Petrograd. Lenin was in exile Geneva and Trotsky was in New York. 1934 Kirov was assassinated perhaps by Stalin but this was the excuse of the Great Terror. Kerensky (the provisional head of government) wanted Lenin arrested as he had received funds from Germany during WW1 and Stalin was the one who hid him. After the Tsars abdication the Bolshevik set up in the Smolny Institute(this has been a girls school) opposite the Winter Palace then in a coup took over the Winter Palace where the government was run and Kerensky fled. Lenin said you can't have a revolution without shooting people. Stalin was a product of Lenin, he did the work for him. Stalin and Trotsky - a Georgian and a Jew were both outsiders and ended up competing with each other. The epilogue of the book tells what happened to some of the people mentioned after the revolution. Many had sad ending and were shot on Stalin’s orders. His 2nd wife Nadia committed suicide and her daughter is known, Svetlana wrote a well published memoir in the west. Stalin’s oldest son Yakov was captured by the Germans and committed suicide. Egnatashvili was the person who sponsored Stalin to school in Georgia and possible was his father. His son Sasha became the ‘Rabbit’ who tasted all Stalin's food The "Rabbit's " grandson is Vladimir Putin.

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Stalin The court of the Red Tsar by Simon Montefiore 2005 Stalin was neither Russian or Georgian in identity. Stalin resented the Georgians as they considered themselves Europeans in an ocean of Asiatics. Georgia did not have a peasant class separated from the intellectuals. Georgia became Christian Orthodox long before Russia ,but turned to Russia for protection against the Moslem or Persians. The prologue starts with a holiday dinner in 1932. . Stalin's wife Nadya was psychitzophrenic suffered from clinical depression. At the party Nadya felt that Stalin was attracted to other women and afterwards killed herself with at pistol. The secret police had different acronyms but were called Chekists and the title KGB was from 1954 1927 The Soviet Ambassador to Poland was assassinated, causing the need for security guards. Stalin's solution to every person problems was death. He was very much a Georgian and brought the vendettas of his forefathers northwards to Moscow. He said to his son I am not Stalin , Stalin is the Soviet Union and the image about me in the press. In Lenin's party he was the ideal marriage between Stalin and Bolshevism and he was a mirror of its virtues and faults. Education was one of the greatest Bolshevik achievements. In 1918 Lenin moved the Russian capital to Moscow as Petrograd was too close to the border. One of the traditions of early Bolshevism was adopting orphans by most of the leaders of fallen soldiers Lazar Kaganowitz was Stalin's deputy. He was the son of a Jewish cobbler and he was involved in mass deportations and executions in the Caucasus. With Nadya suicide the terror became inevitable it altered history as it was a humiliation for Stalin. It created a moment of dogmatic certainty caused by political economic forces but Stalin's personality shaped it. Some of the guests that night would liquidate each other. Stalin and Nadya had been married 14 years. Georgia became part of Russia in 1876. Some of the people killed were those that knew his earlier life but he left others alive. ----------------- Tsaritsyn was a main port through which grain and oil and iron were exported . Stalin arrived by train and 400 Red soldiers and killed counter revolutionaries without mercy. Lenin discovered that he could get neither the ruling class or the peasants to support the communists and thus brought the one party state with the politburo as the war cabinet. ---------------------------- Yagoda was the dominant secret policeman the first generations of Chekists. Kaganowits arranged for the Cossacks of the Kuban region to be deported to Siberia and executed grain hoarders. Suicide was considered the supreme protest and an Bolshevik death. Magankovsky in 1930. Swerlov in 1919 1921 Strikes in Petrograd and the Kroonstad navy. The party cut itself off from social justification and resorted to its dogma alone and fanaticism which would justify their actions in the long run, not by politics of actuality but by politics of prophecy. The Party machine was no longer democratic but run by manipulators. On Lenin's death there were already groups of the first struggle that would culminate in the Great Purge. Trotsky was regarded as an outsider by the old Bolsheviks. The NEP was a concession to the capitalists but was sinful to the purists. In 1986 with the Glasnost It was obvious that the demand economy was not working and Stalinism was attacked for being counterproductive. Glasnost was meant to correct the economy but the humanitarian issue came out about the 5 million peasant families deported about 17 million souls. The greatest achievement was 3 canals dug one of which was now useless. In Khrushchev time the information of the terror came out till then it had only been circulated via Samizdat writers. Even in 1972 when the book the Great Terror was printed in Florence. The writer claimed that the material could only be researched abroad. Khrushchev memoirs talks of 10 million dead.. Many in the west considered the numbers to be only in thousands as destroying the peasants did not make economic sense. The 1937 census board were shot as spies and the records of the 1932 1933 terror were either lost or never created. Sergio – Mikoyan's son of the Politoburo member had his fathers unpublished memoir of 20 million arrests and 7 million deaths. The finest peasant intellectuals and communists were killed. Stalinism left the country as if devastated by a nuclear disaster. The destroyed both people and truth. When a factory producing Combine Harvesters and parts were defective , Stalin decided that this was caused by saboteurs. Sergei Ordzhonikidze in 1921 annexed and Bolshvised, Georgia and Azerbaijan. At the 17th Congress in 1934 of 1966 delegates 1108 were arrested and few of them survived. When the delegates voted for a central committee Stalin got 292 negative votes and these were destroyed. In the early 1930 the Politburo met just to approve of Stalin decisions and later Stalin simply ruled by decree. Kirov death.-He was known to be very close to Stalin, was assassinated in 1934 when he was the head of he Bolshevik party in Leningrad. Stalin immediately went there and headed the investigation. He used this in the same way as Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag. The chief witness died in a car accident not an unusual political incidence at the time. The Checklist in charge claimed that this was an order received from Stalin. Nikolayev was a small time party person he was fired from the party and a Chekist hired him to assassinate. Both Kirov and Gorki's brains were kept preserved and studied instead of their hearts so it shows it was no longer a romantic period. Show Trials Zinonev and Kamerev were 2 of Lenins comrades and had saved Stalins career in 1925 and were sentenced to death by Stalin after the very notorious Moscow Show Trial where that confessed for supporting Trotskyism the trail was all scripted and the crushed men delivered their lines. Hoping that by doing this they would protect the lives of their families. This was the end of the old guard of Lenins original party. In all 6501 people were shot as a result of the Kirov purges. Many others were affected and Tomsky committed suicide leaving a note of his innocence. Suicide was by then a common thing of disheartened communists many writers thought they could write their way out of trouble. Later Stalin decided that Trotsky was involved in Kirov's death and more killing followed. Kamenev was a friend of Gorkis and Gorki turned ill of TB and heart failure but Yagoda was accused of taking part in a conspiracy against him. With the Show Trails execution Stalin no longer had Lenin henchman around ended Leninism and was ready for a Reign of Terror on the party. Trotsky had gone into exile in 1927 after Stalin took over and went into exile in Istanbul and later Mexico where he lived with Diego Riviera and Frida Kholo the artist. Lokoba was poisoned by Beria he was the first of Stalin circle to be got rid of. Soviet Industrialization happened at breakneck speed of 5 years plans and was riddled with mistakes and mismanagement which was blamed on Trotskyite saboteurs. Sergio no longer got on with Stalin and committed suicide. This was announced as a heart attack. Stalin's attitude during the purges was that it was better for 10 innocent to die than for one enemy spy to get through Stalin's purges now turned to people who had flirted with the opposition, ethnic Poles or Germans. Poles in the Bolshevik leadership. Kurds Greeks, Estonians Latvians Harbin Chinese, Persians and Priests as well as 4 % of Mongolia were executed. Yezhov was in charge of the massacres and the public was lead to believe that Stalin was unaware of his actions. Then Stalin started against member of the politburo. All friends of Yagoda were arrested. All those who had fought in Spain wee arrested as Trotsky supporters. Yezhov the Dwarf had no problem executing people he had once worked with and previous friends. Recently there was a play and movie Burned by the Sun about an officer who had been close to Stalin in the civil war and said no harm would come to him but the end he is taken away also. So many railway men were shot that the railways could not run. Many wives were left widows and many of them ended up in Golags. People who had lost faith in the party and the rightness of the party line were considered enemies. Stalins holy terror was similar to the old Christion Inquisition. Regional bosses eliminate their opponents the wrong people and this was the reason they were executed in next wave. 10% of the Georgian party was executed some known personally to Stalin. The people who later took over on Stalin's death - Krushchev Kaganowith and Malakov were able to destroy incriminating evidence against themselves. The most talented Marshal in the Red Army Tukhachevshy who had opposed Stalin in the Civil war was now forced to admit that he was a German spy. 3 of the 5 Marshals were executed as well as the whole command of the officers crop 300 top soldiers. The tribunal of judges knew that they themselves would also end up dead later. The Germans had warned Stalin of a coup by the army and Stalin fell for it. The army was the last thing that could stop Stalin. By 1937 all enemies that were impossible to educate to socialism had to be finished off shot and families deported. It was Kaganowicz who promoted the term Stalinism to replace Leninism and Stalin nodded approval. Most Bolshevik magnates live such unhealthy lives that it is amazing that they lived into old age. Drink smoke and gluttony. Kagnowitz was given the job of running the railways . Khrushchev got Moscow and launched a massive program of building the Metro and the destruction of churches and this won him a place amongst the elite. Yezhov the Dwarf was a bisexual pervert fornicator who suffered TB angina was the one who carried out Stalin's dirty work. Stalin went on an unscheduled tour of the Moscow metro and was cheered spontaneously by the public. This he enjoyed as if he were the Tsar like Ivan the Terrible who murdered the boyars(aristocrats) Because of article in the press of teenage hooligans - Stalin said they should shoot the scum and that made another category of victims. People high up in the party made contingency plans for their children in case they were arrested . Stalin had a Jewish mistress and her son married Kaganowitz niece. This enabled Nazi propaganda to put out that Communists and Jews were in a conspiracy together. Beria arrived on the scene and became Stalin man and was very capable of getting things done. Beria was a Georgian and brought with him an entourage of Georgian assassin thugs. Within the party he settled scores and executed. Stalin promoted Beria as nobody was sacred to Beria. Nadya brother was poisoned and his wife was blamed for that. Stalin was able to show that even his own family had to be sacrificed for the course. Beria sacked Stalin children's nanny as she was German. The Cold War America cold war strategy was to create economic development in the west with her European partners and Japan, the Marshall Plan went hand in hand with Nato.This succeeded despite the social rivalry between the 2 systems. With the end of the Cold War the challenge was to bring the rivals and neutrals into this system. The Cold War brought about a warped stability and code of acceptable behavior that saved the world from a 3rd World War. All the development in the US was against the Cold War as well as putting a man on the moon. The American Army with bases around the world also lead to the spread of English language. Europe has seen 2 kinds of wars. Wars of ideology in which men and women were told what to believe and wars of balance of power. The Cold War was both of these. Bereft of ideological discipline Russia became George Bushes poodle. ____________________________________-

Trotsky Born Leiba Bronstein 1879 and died aged 61

In 1929 he was deported and lived in Istanbul France Norway and finally Mexico till he was assassinated in 1940. He became a prolific writer and that is how he supported his family. Fascism sprung up to prevent the spread of communism and Trotsky was taken up seriously by those who detested Stalin. Trotsky had united the Red army and you needed an authoritarian regime to bring about communism. He came from Jewish farming settlement in New Russia. Trotsky was rehabilitated by Gorbechev in 1988 After Lenin died the word Leninism and Leninist came about and it was the triumvirate of Stalin Kamarev and Zinoniev in control. The city of Petrograd changed its name then, Stalingrad got its name in 1925.Lenin praised John Reed book " Ten days in October" It was Lenin who took the decision against the advice of others and had succeeded and Lenin and Trotsky alone were the intellectuals behind the revolution. Kamerev claimed there was an unbridgeable gulf between Trotsky and Leninism End Khrushchev Beria and Molotov spoke at Stalin's funeral. The Beria was executed and Khrushchev and Bulganin were the leaders. This was during a time of crises in East Germany. In 1956 the secret speech was supported by Mikoyan. Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum 5 years later. Mikoyan was the one who dealt with both Castro and Kennedy and was at Stalin funeral as well as Kennedy's 1964 Khrushchev was overthrown by Brezhnev and Kosygin s a result of both the missile crises and agricultural failure and died in 1971. Mikoyan in 1971. Polina died in 1970 while Molotov in 1984. Malenkov died in 1988 a reborn Christian, While Kaganowicz outlived everyone to see the collapse of the Soviet Union that he had built in 1991 Putins grandfather cooked for Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin but never talked about it. In fact Putin's grandfather Anaswili could have been Stalin half-brother as they don't believe his mother's husband was his father. When the war began Stalin ended the terror as there was nobody left of his enemies.