Young Stalin

Stalin remains, like Hitler, the personification of evil. This enthralling biography reads like a thriller and reveals the extraordinary journey of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red Tsar. Born into poverty, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet who initially trained as a priest, but found his mission as a fanatical revolutionary. Part-intellectual, part-brigand, Stalin became the mastermind of bank robberies, protection-rackets, extortion, arson, piracy and murder. The result of major new research in the Russian and Georgian archives, this book shows how the brutal paranoia and gangsterism of the criminal underworld, combined with pitiless ideology, taught Stalin how to triumph in the Kremlin - and create the USSR in his flawed image.