Stalin (eBook)
848 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-42793-9 (ISBN)
This widely acclaimed biography provides a vivid and riveting account of Stalin and his courtiers--killers, fanatics, women, and children--during the terrifying decades of his supreme power. In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research and narrative ?lan, Simon Sebag Montefiore gives us the everyday details of a monstrous life.We see Stalin playing his deadly game of power and paranoia at debauched dinners at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We witness first-hand how the dictator and his magnates carried out the Great Terror and the war against the Nazis, and how their families lived in this secret world of fear, betrayal, murder, and sexual degeneracy. Montefiore gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin's dictatorship, and a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
This widely acclaimed biography of Stalin and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of Stalin as Soviet dictator, Marxist leader, and Russian tsar.Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life and murderous cruelty of this secret world. Written with bracing narrative verve, this feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing. Showing how Stalin's triumphs and crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism and his gifted but flawed character, this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated and human as he was brutal and chilling.
The Georgian and the Schoolgirl
Nadya and Stalin had been married for fourteen years but it extended deeper and longer than that, so steeped was their marriage in Bolshevism. They had shared the formative experiences of the underground life and intimacy with Lenin during the Revolution, then the Civil War. Stalin had known her family for nearly thirty years and he had first met her in 1904 when she was three. He was then twenty-five and he had been a Marxist for six years.
Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was not born on 21 December 1879, Stalin's official birthday. 'Soso' was actually born in a tiny shack (that still exists) to Vissarion, or 'Beso,' and his wife Ekaterina, 'Keke,' ne Geladze, over a year earlier on 6 December 1878. They lived in Gori, a small town beside the Kura River in the romantic, mountainous and defiantly un-Russian province of Georgia, a small country thousands of miles from the Tsar's capital: it was closer to Baghdad than St. Petersburg.
Soso's father was a violent, drunken semi-itinerant cobbler who savagely beat both Soso and Keke. She in turn, as the child later recalled, 'thrashed him mercilessly.' Soso once threw a dagger at his father. Stalin reminisced how Beso and Father Charkviani, the local priest, indulged in drinking bouts together to the fury of his mother: 'Father, don't make my husband a drunk, it'll destroy my family.' Keke threw out Beso. Stalin was proud of her 'strong willpower.' When Beso later forcibly took Soso to work as a cobbling apprentice in Tiflis, Keke's priests helped get him back.
Stalin's mother took in washing for local merchants. She was pious and became close to the priests who protected her. But she was also earthy and spicy: she may have made the sort of compromises that are tempting for a penniless single mother, becoming the mistress of her employers. This inspired the legends that often embroider the paternity of famous men. It is possible that Stalin was the child of his godfather, an affluent innkeeper, officer and amateur wrestler named Koba Egnatashvili. Afterwards, Stalin protected Egnatashvili's two sons, who remained friends until his death and reminisced in old age about Egnatashvili's wrestling prowess. Nonetheless, one sometimes has to admit that great men are the children of their own fathers. Stalin was said to resemble Beso uncannily. Yet he himself once asserted that his father was a priest.
Stalin was born with the second and third toes of his left foot joined. He suffered a pock-marked face from an attack of smallpox and later damaged his left arm, possibly in a carriage accident. He grew up into a sallow, stocky, surly youth with speckled honey-coloured eyes and thick black hair-a kinto, Georgian street urchin. He was exceptionally intelligent with an ambitious mother who wanted him to be a priest, perhaps like his real father. Stalin later boasted that he learned to read at five by listening to Father Charkviani teaching the alphabet. The five-year-old then helped Charkviani's thirteen-year-old daughter with her reading.
In 1888, he entered the Gori Church School and then, triumphantly, in 1894, won a 'five rouble scholarship' to the Tiflis Seminary in the Georgian capital. As Stalin later told a confidant, 'My father found out that along with the scholarship, I also earned money (five roubles a month) as a choirboy . ....
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 18.12.2007 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-307-42793-5 / 0307427935 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-307-42793-9 / 9780307427939 |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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