Portrait of a Tyrant as Young Man.(Books)(Young Stalin)(Joseph Stalin)(Book review)

A telling new account of Stalin's childhood depicts a streetwise thug raised in conflict.

On June 26, 1907, a stagecoach convoy guarded by Cossacks and carrying the equivalent of about $3.4 million to the state bank in the Georgian city of Tiflis (today called Tbilisi) ran straight into an ambush. Heavily armed gangsters unleashed a frontal assault, complete with multiple explosions and a barrage of gunfire. Grenades "exploded with a deafening noise and an infernal force that disemboweled horses and tore men to pieces, spattering the cobbles with innards and blood," writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in his new book, "Young Stalin" (460 pages. Knopf). Of course, the mastermind of that bloody heist, which took about 40 lives, was the man the world would come to know later as Joseph Stalin.

Montefiore's earlier masterful biography of the Soviet tyrant, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," focused on his years in power. "Young Stalin" is much more than an expansion of the first chapters in that biography: it's a full-blown portrait of the young man. In this case, "young" means right up until the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when he was almost 40. Once again tapping into a rich vein of material from previously closed archives in Russia and Georgia, Montefiore has produced a portrait of the young Stalin that is as complex and morbidly fascinating as his previous work.

The son of a drunken cobbler and a strong-willed mother, Josef Djugashvili, as he was originally called, was raised in conflict. At home, the struggle was between his parents who soon went their separate ways. His father wanted him to learn his trade and work in a shoe factory, while his mother insisted that he ...