![]() ![]() ![]() Ioseb Djugashvili was born in 1878 in the small village of Gori, Georgia, a land between the Black and Caspian seas that had been conquered by the tsars earlier in the century. ![]() What caused Stalin to choose Marxism and social democracy over the other political and organizational alternatives that were becoming available to him as the nineteenth century drew to a close? Suny’s painstaking reconstruction of Stalin’s early years helps remove the sense that the young man’s choice was inevitable. His nonparty socialism proves to be a help, not a hindrance. Suny’s scholarship is under no such disabling handicap. That perspective stands in the way of an objective account of the intra-Russian Social Democratic controversies that consumed much of Stalin’s life as an underground revolutionary. Kotkin’s multivolume biography, Stalin, is an unrelieved jeremiad against socialism and Marxism. Suny’s intervention is on an altogether different plane when we compare it to Stephen Kotkin’s study of the same topic. It is a history of the workers’ movement and of social democracy in the tsarist empire, from the turn of the century down to and including the October Revolution, with special emphasis on the Caucasus. Ronald Suny’s scholarly study of Stalin’s life until October 1917 goes beyond biography. The work under review is in a league of its own. ![]() Review of Stalin: Passage to Revolution, by Ronald Grigor Suny (Princeton University Press, 2020). ![]()
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