Biography/Stalin: A Biography By Robert: On my sideboard, I have mounted a permanent exhibition of political kitsch which includes items such as a Croatian chocolate passport, a Hungarian tin which claims to contain the last breath of communism, and a mini-statue of de Gaulle which is snowed upon with glitter when you shake the transparent container, writes Misha Glenny
But the centrepiece belongs rightfully to one irreplaceable item - a bottle which I purchased in 1993, its year of manufacture, in the central Georgian town of Gori. It contains a litre of Stalin vodka and Uncle Joe's face beams benignly from the centre of the bottle.
Gori still boasts an enormous statue of Stalin in its central square, a stone's throw from the permanent Stalin museum and the place where (allegedly but unconvincingly) Stalin was actually born. It is almost impossible to hear a bad word spoken about Stalin in Gori. Given the miserable decline of living standards in Georgia since the collapse of communism, this is hardly surprising. Georgia was known as the playground of the Soviet Union with a reputation for the finest food, the best wine, and an obsession with toasting health which may explain why it produced little else than a reputation for sentimental partying.
Despite an intense sense of national pride, Georgians have more reason to mourn the demise of the Soviet Union than most of its other citizens. And it is for this reason that some Georgians still look upon Stalin as a benign figure.
In his new biography of the Soviet dictator, Robert Service has given the most convincing description yet of how Stalin's insecure Georgian childhood fashioned his psychology. At key points in the book, we are reminded of Stalin's duality - on the one hand he was a proud Caucasian toughie who organized bank robberies and could drink spirits all night. On the other, he was a man who aspired to understand and interpret (crassly) high art and politics.
This dichotomy is significant - Caucasian brutality fused with the imperial might and arrogance of Russian power. Stalin was seized by a zealotry often associated with figures from the political periphery and Service describes this carefully and convincingly.
The distinguished historian of Russia also stresses that Stalin's commitment to Bolshevism in the pre- and immediately post-revolutionary years was thoroughly genuine. He is sceptical of the traditional view that Stalin was a dull-witted pedant who built his power through a talent for bureaucratic manipulation after Lenin's death in the 1920s. On the contrary, Service maintains, he wrestled with the toughest problems of theoretical and practical politics as a member of the central committee and as editor of Pravda. This intense political arena inside the party became the struggle for supremacy within the nascent Soviet state.
This is the first serious political biography of Stalin since the opening of the archives in Moscow and St Petersburg in the 1990s and Service has made good use of them. He might rue the fact that publication comes after Simon Sebag Montefiore's portrait of the Court of the Red Tsar because the latter offers a tremendously vivid, gossipy account of Stalin which is a riveting read.
But Service does not avoid personal issues or the key role that gossip plays in a totalitarian society - on the contrary, he records with disgust Stalin's penchant for teenage girls and his general contempt for women and their place in society. But he is much stronger than Sebag Montefiore in placing Stalin's personal shortcomings and strengths within a broader historical context.
Beginners might find it hard starting with the Service biography. If you don't know what the Workers' Opposition or the NEP were, you may occasionally find yourself a shade baffled. But that should not put anybody off the book, as it is written with admirable clarity and a light touch.
But no biography can reveal the central mystery about Stalin. What was the precise mixture of personal psychology and political circumstances that transformed this unattractive man, who sulked and whined but worked very hard, who held a grudge but was not especially threatening, into an unchained monster of unprecedented nastiness for whom no human life except his own held any value, "the Kremlin mountaineer, the murderer and peasant-slayer", in poet Osim Mandelstam's phrase?
Perhaps the discovery of the Stalin diaries might help. But even if such documents existed then, as Service's biography makes plain, the dictator's style was so duplicitous that their reliability would be open to question.
The accumulated wisdom we now possess, thanks to all the excellent work by Deutscher, Conquest, Medvedev et al, and now Robert Service, teaches us the obvious truth that the absence of any institutional limits on power facilitates a calamitous hubris. If ambitious, chippy individuals and their craven mischievous clique seize control of the creation, interpretation and execution of the law, then there is no law. And if there is no law in large, powerful countries like the Soviet Union, then it is a matter of concern for the rest of the world.
Misha Glenny is a broadcaster and historian who is currently writing a book on trans-national organised crime and globalisation
Stalin: A Biography By Robert Service MacMillan, 528pp. £25