Review by Avedis Bedros-Hadjian

(Bloomberg) — In the 1930s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin visited his mother in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

Stalin, well into his 50s and possibly the most feared man in the world, asked his mother why she had beaten him so much as a child. His mother replied, "It didn't do you any harm."

One only wonders. Dismissed by Trotsky as a Caucasian gangster and by the Menshevik N.N. Sukhanov as "a grey blur," Stalin was much more than a master of bureaucratic intrigue. Yet none of the vast array of books written about him has done much to dispel the notion of Stalin as a drab, tyrannical committeeman, the portrait his rivals painted in thick brushes.

All this makes Simon Sebag Montefiore's brilliant, disturbing "Young Stalin" difficult to put down. No book has so vividly captured Stalin's early years. When you finish reading, you'll crave another 500 pages of childhood brawls, bank robberies and escapes from Siberia.

Mining sources he developed over years of reporting from the Caucasus and elsewhere, Montefiore has crafted a grand biography.

Every detail and every anecdote contributes to a rich mosaic showing the life of little, weak Soso — as Stalin was called by his mother and friends —from his years as a toddler fascinated by mimosa flowers up to the October Revolution, which finds him as Lenin's loyal henchman and the editor of Pravda.

The germs of the Stalin of the Great Terror are here, yet Montefiore documents a time in which he could have gone in any direction.

Soso, a hypersensitive, unforgiving child "who wept a lot" yet liked taking on bigger and stronger children, went on to become Soselo, a promising poet who carried out robberies for the outlawed Communists.

In Gori, Soso's hometown in Georgia — then an unruly Caucasian province of the Russian Empire — the conservative values of a pious, Orthodox Christian community coexisted with street violence, heavy drinking and promiscuity.

Stalin would later bring these habits to the Kremlin, a world Montefiore described in all its splendour and sordidness in his earlier "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar."

"Young Stalin," which was recently awarded the 2007 Costa Biography Award in London, furthers the author's thesis that Stalin dominated his peers and then the Communist Party's inner circle through charm rather than fear.

This is arguably Montefiore's main contribution to our understanding of the quintessential totalitarian dictator.

Yet in bringing Stalin back to life with such effectiveness, his main accomplishment may also be a weakness. The biographer is fascinated by his magnetic, tortured subject.

His book succeeds so brilliantly in recreating Stalin the friend, the womaniser, the drinking buddy, the daredevil revolutionary that we sometimes lose sight of Stalin the monster. Fortunately, though, anecdotes mentioned in passing do sometimes break the spell.

Father Kasiane Gachechiladze, a Georgian priest who aided Stalin in transporting money and supplies for the Communist rebels in 1905, was so captivated by the young agitator that he told him he would have made "a great priest." Later, during Stalin's dictatorship, the priest wrote that he "wished he had murdered his companion," Montefiore tells us.

That is a welcome reminder that this book is not a novel and its main character is not a hero.

"Young Stalin" is published by Alfred A. Knopf (460 pages, $30).

Avedis Bedros-Hadjian is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.