{"id":184578,"date":"2021-05-29T16:42:44","date_gmt":"2021-05-29T16:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/05\/stalin-ronald-suny-book-interview-passage-to-revolution-georgia-russian-revolution\/"},"modified":"2021-05-29T16:42:44","modified_gmt":"2021-05-29T16:42:44","slug":"how-josef-stalin-became-a-bolshevik","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/05\/29\/how-josef-stalin-became-a-bolshevik\/","title":{"rendered":"How Josef Stalin Became a Bolshevik"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Ronald Suny\u2019s Stalin: Passage to Revolution<\/cite> traces Josef Stalin\u2019s trajectory from his boyhood in Georgia to the Russian Revolution in 1917. In an interview, Suny explains the specificities of the Georgian socialist movement, Stalin\u2019s role in the revolution, and why Stalinism was \u201cbloody, ruthless,\u201d and \u201cthe nadir of the Soviet experiment.\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Young Russian revolutionary and political leader Josef Stalin in 1915. (Hulton Archive\/Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Joseph Stalin is having a bit of a moment. He is currently more popular in Russia now than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, thanks to a rehabilitation campaign by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Death of Stalin<\/i> was one of the most acclaimed films of recent years. And in certain quarters of the internet, young Stalin is regarded not as one of history\u2019s greatest monsters but one of its biggest hotties<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ronald Suny has devoted his life to studying the history of the Soviet Union and the countries of the South Caucasus. His newest book is the long-awaited biography Stalin: Passage to Revolution<\/i><\/a>, <\/i>which <\/i>chronicles the transformation of a sensitive Georgian boy named Iosib \u201cSoso\u201d Djugashvili into the man known to the world as Stalin. Suny brings a wealth of previously unavailable historical material to bear in analyzing the early life of a budding revolutionary, as well as the trials and tribulations of the Russian Empire\u2019s social-democratic movement. It also sheds light on the underappreciated legacy of Georgia\u2019s social democrats, who played a leading role in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions and established an independent, Menshevik-led republic in 1918\u20131921.<\/p>\n

Suny spoke with Jacobin<\/i> contributing editor Chris Maisano about the making of Stalin, the pioneering contributions of Georgian social democracy, and how socialists today should view Stalin\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

<\/h2>\n
\n \n \n
Chris Maisano<\/dt>\n \n

There’s no shortage of material on Stalin out there. What motivated you to write this particular book?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Ronald Suny<\/dt>\n \n

About thirty years ago, I asked myself how I could get people interested in the area that I’ve invested so much of my life into. That is what we now call the South Caucasus, the countries that are today Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. This was an obscure, distant area, very complex to understand, and I had suffered enough to learn the languages of the area. I’m Armenian by heritage but born in the United States, so Armenian was not my native language. My parents spoke it, but not to me. So I learned that in graduate school.<\/p>\n

Then I went to Georgia. I learned Georgian, which is very difficult. And at the moment, I’m now working on learning Turkish. It took a long time to get all this stuff done. Then I realized, what if I actually wrote about Stalin, the most important figure in this area, and used that as what Alfred Hitchcock called a \u201cMacGuffin,\u201d a gimmick to get them pulled into the story? That was one motivation.<\/p>\n

The second, as any of my students at Michigan, or earlier at Oberlin or the University of Chicago, would know: I have a great interest in socialism, Marxism, the labor movement, Russian social democracy, and so forth. Those are the two things that led me to take on this topic. It proved to be very successful, even though it took a long time, because you have that central figure you can follow through this very complex and shifting history from roughly his birth, in December 1878, to the revolution in 1917. This is the story of young Stalin, the making of the revolutionary. Maybe, if I live long enough, I’ll write the second volume. We’ll see. Inshallah<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Why did it take so long? As I started to write in the 1980s and signed my first contract, I realized that the Soviet Union was shifting (though I didn’t know it was going to collapse). Then the archives started being opened. So I just put it aside to write some other books: The Soviet Experiment<\/i>, They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide<\/i>, The Revenge of the Past<\/i>, a number of other things. Then I came back to Stalin and worked in the Russian and Georgian archives, and in Armenia, and got the book that you see today.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Chris Maisano<\/dt>\n \n

As you said, the book covers from his birth to the 1917 revolution, the young Stalin. What is different about your approach than, say, that of Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose book, Young Stalin<\/i>, covers the same period in his life?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Ronald Suny<\/dt>\n \n

I met Simon Sebag Montefiore in a caf\u00e9 in Kensington, in London, once. He said, “So what are you interested in, and why are you writing this book?” This was before his book came out. And I said, “Oh, I’m interested in the labor movement, Marxism, social democracy, revolution.” And he said to me, “Oh, good. I’m interested in his women.” So I thought, “Well, okay, we have a nice division of labor.”<\/p>\n

Montefiore wrote a very readable book. There’s lots of good stuff in it. He didn’t himself go into the archives, he doesn’t know Georgian, and I’m not sure how good his Russian is, even. But he did work there, and he got a lot of material, some of it brand new. That was good for me. But his book is a popular book. It’s a little bit, in my taste, sensationalist. Stalin is a bandit, a gangster, a womanizer, even a pedophile in the book. In all of these ways, it’s a different kind of book, and it doesn’t deal with Stalin’s journalistic writings, his theory of nationalities (which is key to his success), the intricacies and nuances of Russian social democracy.<\/p>\n

My book is basically a scholarly book, but I tried to write it in an accessible way. Any intelligent person can read the book and understand what’s going on. But it’s based on the conventions of historical scholarship, which is looking for anomalies and dealing with contradictions. Everything is evidence-based. This is the way I decided to do the book. Stephen Kotkin at Princeton has written two of what will be three or four volumes on Stalin, but he largely neglects the earlier period of Stalin\u2019s life. He has some of the conventional sources, but he’s not interested in the intricacies of this movement, or of Stalin\u2019s early psychology. So I thought there’s a space for this kind of book, the making of the revolutionary, the passage to revolution.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Chris Maisano<\/dt>\n \n

One of the things that really stands out in your book is how many of the key figures in the Russian Empire’s social-democratic movement came from Georgia. Why was Georgia, an isolated country with a very small industrial working class, one of social democracy’s biggest strongholds?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Ronald Suny<\/dt>\n \n

In general, lots of people think that there is something of a natural tendency to move from empire to nation. That is, that you develop a sense of who you are as a nation, you revolt against colonialism, and you make your new state. So one would’ve expected that the nationalist movement in Georgia would’ve been the most powerful. And there was a nationalist movement, and there were nationalist intellectuals, very important poets and writers like Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, and so forth.<\/p>\n