I just finished Simon Montefiore’s recent and very readable biography of Stalin’s early years.  Actually it covers those from his birth in 1878 until the Communists came to power in 1917, when he was 39 years old.

        Apparently a great many documents have recently become accessible about Stalin.  He was, according to Montefiore, a complicated combination of intellectual and thug.  While it is always problematical to judge poetry in translation, those of Stalin’s included in the book are not bad.

        When he wasn’t writing poetry, Stalin was helping finance Lenin by extortion, kidnappings for ransom, and bank robberies.

        A year before the October 1917 revolution, Stalin spent the summer almost entirely alone, hunting and fishing in Siberia, to which he had been exiled.

        I find Stalin more difficult to understand than Hitler.   Hitler killed those he considered rightly or wrongly to be enemies; Stalin killed millions of his own supporters.  But just as reading about Hitler did not really provide an answer as to the source of his anti-Semitism, so this book did not really reveal why Stalin became as great a tyrant as the world has ever known.

        I’ll have to read more.

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The photos are of a boat that has been standing in a field just off the road between Opua and Pahia ever since I sailed across from Australia in 2003.  It may have been there much longer.  No one seems to know its story or to whom it belongs.  Never was a ‘NO EXIT’ sign more appropriate.

        Some of you may recall my memory of the lines from T.S.  Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” I used at the beginning of RETURN TO THE SEA:

                Between the vision

                And the reality

                Falls the Shadow