Young Stalin tells the story of an exceptional, charismatic, darkly turbulent young man born into obscurity who embraced revolutionary idealism, the world in which he found his Messianic mission in life. Equal parts scholar and terrorist, Stalin was so impressive in his brutality that Lenin made him, along with Trotsky, his chief henchman.Here is Stalin the supreme dictator in the making—his psychology, his hatreds, his loves, his knowledge of the world—and steeped in the paranoia of the underworld, learning how to triumph in the Kremlin and to create the USSR in his profoundly flawed image.
Based on exhaustive research and astonishing new evidence, Young Stalin is a brilliant prehistory of the USSR from the perspective of those who would bring it into being.