Young Stalin or American Political Parties and Elections

Young Stalin

Author: Simon Sebag Montefior

Based on ten years' astonishing new research, here is the thrilling story of how a charismatic, dangerous boy became a student priest, romantic poet, gangster mastermind, prolific lover, murderous revolutionary, and the merciless politician who shaped the Soviet Empire in his own brutal image: How Stalin became Stalin.

The Washington Post - Ronald Grigor Suny

Montefiore enfolds even what is familiar about Stalin in a vivid narrative rich with new details and sensational revelations.

The New York Times - William Grimes

For decades historians accepted the portrait of Stalin painted by his rivals. He was, in the words of one political adversary, Nikolai Sukhanov, "a gray blur," a mediocre party hack who managed, through stealth and intrigue, to wrest the levers of power from the brilliant revolutionaries surrounding him…In Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore's meticulously researched, authoritative biography of Stalin's early years, the blur comes into sharp focus. Building on the revisionist studies of Robert Service and Richard Overy, Mr. Montefiore offers a detailed picture of Stalin's childhood and youth, his shadowy career as a revolutionary in Georgia and his critical role during the October Revolution. No one, henceforth, need ever wonder how it was that Stalin found his way into Lenin's inner circle, or took his place in the ruling troika that assumed power after the storming of the Winter Palace.

Harry Willems - Library Journal

We know him as Stalin, or Josef Stalin, but before he settled on this alias he had at least a dozen others, including Koba and Soso. His youthful friends were responsible for most of his monikers, which were sometimes taken of necessity to escape from the Okhrana (secret police) and the local police. No book published in the last 100 years goes into as much detail about the youthful Stalin as Montefiore's does. Unlike Sarah Davies and James Harris's Stalin: A New History, which has a 25-page chapter covering Stalin's youth, Montefiore (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar) uses many newly available archival records from Stalin's peers to greatly amplify information on the man's early years and his growing attachment to the revolutionary movement. Stalin's early experiences shaped his paranoia for the rest of his life, and his revolutionary experiences reinforced it. Montefiore says, "The machine of repression, the flinthearted, paranoid psychology of perpetual conspiracy and the taste for extreme bloody solutions to all challenges were not just accidents, but glamorized and institutionalized. He was patron of these brutal tendencies but also their personification." Montefiore goes on to refute the notion that Stalin was a double agent of the Okhrana and that he "missed the revolution," ideas that his detractors formulated from flimsy evidence. This accessible book is highly recommended for academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/1/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

Joe Stalin, gang-banger. In this superb prequel to his Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004, etc.), novelist, historian and UK television personality Montefiore observes that there have been many character studies of Adolf Hitler, but fewer on his semblable. Stalin, as Montefiore shows, took pains to hide the facts of his youth-which in some ways lasted until he was nearly 40, when the Revolution broke out-and to make it difficult for him to be seen as anything but a great man. As Montefiore's groundbreaking work shows, there was much to hide. Though Stalin was a man of keen intellect and quite bookish, he was also a thug who styled himself a descendant of a "Caucasian bandit-hero called Koba," whence his familiar nickname. He wore a thick beard and long hair, committed crimes ranging from petty theft to extortion to bank robbery and inducted fellow young people into the pleasures of reading Emile Zola's Germinal. His fondness for brigand antics made his more moderate comrades in the underground think of him as "a muddled young comrade," but he acquired new discipline in the tsar's prisons, where, even if he "preferred rogues to revolutionaries," he also made himself into an indispensable authority on Marxism, ready to cite chapter and verse in any discussion. A gift from a fellow revolutionary of Machiavelli's Prince set him on a different course, and soon he would be in a position to revise his past to make it seem as if he had been at Lenin's side the whole time. "At heart, he was too intelligent not to appreciate that many of the paeans to his youth were ridiculous," writes Montefiore, who has scoured the archives to make this book. Nonetheless, Stalin insisted on those paeans allthe same. Essential to understanding one of the 20th century's premier monsters and the nation he wrought. First printing of 60,000

New interesting book: Probabilistic Robotics or Brothers in Arms

American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Sandy L Maisel

Few Americans and even fewer citizens of other nations understand the electoral process in the United States. Still fewer understand the role played by political parties in the electoral process or the ironies within the system. Participation in elections in the United States is much lower than in the vast majority of mature democracies. Perhaps this is because of the lack of competition in a country where only two parties have a true chance of winning, despite the fact that a large number of citizens claim allegiance to neither and think badly of both. Or perhaps it is because in the U.S. campaign contributions disproportionately favor incumbents in most legislative elections, or that largely unregulated groups such as the now notorious 527s have as much impact on the outcome of a campaign as do the parties or the candidates' campaign organizations. Studying these factors, you begin to get a very clear picture indeed of the problems that underlay our much trumpeted electoral system.
This Very Short Introduction introduces the reader to these issues and more, providing an insider's view of how the system actually works while shining a light on some of its flaws. As we enter what is sure to be yet another highly contested election year, it is more important than ever that Americans take the time to learn the system that puts so many in power.