still on the "WANTED" list ...

Curios lucru, "Telegraph.Co.uk" a ales sa publice doua recenzii referitoare la cartea "Young Stalin" a lui Simon Sebag Montefiore, ...

Ambele fiind interesante iar eu neavind rabdarea sa discern pozitionarea politica (if any) a punctelor de vedere, m-am gindit sa le etalez aici pe amindoua.

(Recenzia -A-)
"This book is the prequel to "Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar", a rare event in the biography business. With the wisdom of hindsight, it might have been preferable for the two volumes to have appeared the other way round, but readers are unlikely to be disappointed. Young Stalin is a gripping read. The prose is a little breathless at times, especially at the ends of chapters, but Simon Sebag Montefiore's research, especially in the Georgian archives, is brilliant. The book provides a wealth of serious and scurrilous detail, creating a memorable portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest monsters.

[...]

Stalin soon became a natural revolutionary and terrorist, shamelessly relishing the organisation of hold-ups, raids to capture weapons, and protection rackets. Extortion was not always necessary. The Georgian revolutionaries were sometimes also funded by tycoons and nobles opposed to the Russian Tsarist regime.

[...]

Lenin truly admired Stalin's ruthlessness. "That is exactly the sort of person I need," he said. [...]

Stalin: "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world." His comrades did not take him seriously, which was to be their misfortune, to say nothing of the whole country's. This is an impressively objective book, considering that it covers the development of such an appalling tyrant..."
(intreaga recenzie: Fine young criminal, by Anthony Beevor)

(Recenzia -B-)

"He was never some play-acting student rebel, and although he was intelligent in an inarticulate, quiet sort of way, he despised professional 'intellectuals', many of whom he would later have shot. Very rapidly, Djugashvili submerged himself in the revolutionary underground, bringing strife and mayhem to the oil towns of Baku and Batumi. Having probably started a fire in the Rothschild's Caspian and Black Sea Oil Company in 1902, Djugashvili used a strike to extort money so that arson would not become endemic.
In succeeding years he graduated from extortion to murder and armed robbery, using some 39 aliases, ranging from 'Joe Pox' to 'Oddball Osip', and employing several psychopathic associates, notably the baroquely vicious Simon 'Kamo' Ter-Petrossian.

Sebag Montefiore gives a brilliant account of the great 1907 Tiflis heist, when Stalin's gang held up a convoy delivering roubles: the resulting scenes of mayhem were worthy of the De Niro and Pacino film Heat, although here the bullets and bombs flew amidst armoured wagons and mounted Cossack guards. These robberies were essential to the funding of Lenin's exiled Bolshevik Party..."
(intreaga recenzie: A higher order of homicidal maniac, by Michael Burleigh)