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YOUNG STALIN is a remarkable adventure story about an exceptional, turbulent young man, born in exoticism, raised in the church, fancying himself a poet, then embracing revolutionary idealism and thereby finding his romantic Messianic mission in life. All the trails of Stalin the Great Dictator are founded in these times - not merely his psychology, but his hatreds, his loves, his intellectual interests, his gangsterish murderousness, his friendships, his knowledge of the world. Above all in the underground Bolshevik life are the seeds that grew into the paranoia and Terror of the Soviet Imperium. YOUNG STALIN is the product of major new research. Says the author: 'I have been amazed at the vast new materials available not only in the RGASPI archives in Moscow (Stalin's own papers amongst other things) but also in Georgia where I have found already several new memoirs and in Siberia, London, Stockholm and Vienna where I have found his old houses, new police records and more.'
'A portrait that defies the clichéd image of the megalomaniacal Georgian peasant'
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