What Stalin got up to in Stepney

The dictator never spoke of his months in a grimy London bedsit, so a gripping novel fills in the gaps

240pp, Sandstone, RRP £8.99, ebook £5.99

The man born Josef Dzhugashvili was once regarded by historians as a “grey blur” before his rise to power; in the words of Trotsky, a “mediocrity”. The unsealing of various archives has changed all that. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s riproaring Young Stalin (2007) revealed the future dictator as an intellectual firebrand, political agitator, gangster and pirate, trainee priest and would-be poet.

According to Robert Service’s 2004 biography, Stalin never spoke or wrote about his two-month stay in London from May to June of 1907, for the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, held in the fraught aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution. It is this psychological aperture that British novelist Stephen May (best known for 2012’s Life! Death! Prizes!) steps into for his sixth novel, Sell Us the Rope, its title taken from a Marxist dictum: “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.”

In May’s openly confected and conflated retelling, a 29-year-old Joseph Stalin lands at Harwich in Essex on May 10 1907. Having masterminded a campaign of terror and banditry across his native country, he is now Georgia’s leading Bolshevik, but facing expulsion from the wider party and an imposed suspension of his criminal “expropriations”. Soon, he is the pawn of conspiracies orchestrated by Lenin and the Russian secret police.

He is haunted by a grim childhood at the hands of an alcoholic father he claims to have killed (one of his many gruesome tall tales) and broods on how to avoid becoming “one more filthy speck on the manure heap of history”. Taking the name “Koba” after one of his fictional robber-heroes, he has left behind a new bride and threemonth-old son. With only a pittance to live on, he is forced to stay at what Jack London called the “monster dosshouse” of Tower House in Stepney, out of reach of Special Branch, while leaders such as Lenin and the irksome, “pompous” Trotsky room in Bloomsbury.

Stalin knows the great Black Sea oil cities of Baku and Batumi, but he finds London far more daunting, “the engine room of the Empire”, a “machine”, he writes, that “grinds” and “crushes” its citizens. Priding himself on being a true child of the working class, in contrast to rich émigrés such as Lenin and Trotsky, he strikes up a protective friendship with a young boy being abused by his father, reflecting that “if man is bullied and brutalised and humiliated at work, he will try to expunge the pain of that by doing the same to his wife and children at home”.

As the summit unfolds, May sets up a fictional romantic subplot involving Stalin and Finnish lathe operator Elli Vuokko, a real-life figure who fought in Finland’s civil war as a Red guardswoman and was executed in 1918. This digression is less interesting than the depiction of the young female delegates, “girl nihilists” toting revolvers and being taught ju-jitsu by suffragette Edith Garrud – one of the first female selfdefence instructors in the West.

If May leans to the picaresque in his depiction of Stalin, there are also intimations of the monster of history in bloom. “The first person

He is terrified of being just ‘one more filthy speck on the manure heap of history’

I killed was a child,” he tells Elli. “The second was my father.” He recalls shooting the boy, one of his gang who fluffs a hit, and then cutting his heart out with a “thickbladed half-moon knife”, as a “message”. He also boasts of killing “an enemy of socialism” in a “kindly” fashion, then wiping out the man’s whole family, including a baby boy, “less efficiently, less kindly”. We see him plotting with Lenin a thrilling heist he will soon pull off on the stagecoach of the State Bank in Tbilisi, savouring the projected mayhem, where “children fall under hooves, under the wheels of wagons… bright blood on the cobbles”.

May’s compelling imagining of a few overlooked weeks in Stalin’s life presents a figure of fascinating contradictions. His Stalin is an idealist and a thug, haunted by his murderous fantasies and his past, stuck in a pitiless imperial metropolis full of “quiet despair… like poison gas”, which both repels him and fuels his inner “shadow world”. It is a captivating thought-experiment that marks a consolidation of May’s powers as a writer.