"You absolute horror of a human being," the young artist Simon says to the Jack Nicholson character at one point in As Good As It Gets, and the same thought occurred to me while reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin (Knopf). I greatly admired Montefiore's 2003 book, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which, despite the horrors of life in the Kremlin in Stalin's time, had an undercurrent of grisly, knockabout comedy as these lumpish, craven, murderous Communist bureaucrats and their awful wives toadied fearfully to the biggest murderer of them all. The Soviet nomenklatura (the privileged party "elite," much as I dislike using the word in connection with them) were so dreadful that they lent a kind of macabre dignity to Stalin — a suspicious, paranoid, and unforgiving monster of cruelty, a Lear without humanity or forgiveness whose idea of a good time was initialing lists of old Party comrades to be executed.

One has to admire Montefiore for more than his self-evident relentless skill as a sifter of huge amounts of research — he is industrious to a flaw — since not every historian or biographer would want to spend years with a creature as awful as Stalin locked up inside his head. It takes more guts than I have to confront the ultimate in evil and banality, and to record every detail of it. So, when reading Young Stalin, I had to ask myself: Why am I reading this? And why is Montefiore writing it?

Admittedly, the second question is none of my business, and on the face of it there is probably something to be said for giving us an accurate portrait of Stalin, young or old. Perhaps the country in which one hopes it will be read with attention and sold in great quantity is Russia — most of the rest of the world has long since given up any illusions it may once have had about Stalin, as well as the system he led, and recognizes him, along with Mao and Hitler, as one of the three most monstrous despots of the 20th century. One of the scariest things about Stalin is that reading about him reminds one of how little the Russians have changed, and how many of them still yearn to feel the knout of authority on their backs, whether it is wielded by the czar, Stalin, or Vladimir Putin.

No less an authority than Ulysses S. Grant remarked that when it came to biography what he wanted to know was "what a man did as a boy," and Montefiore has certainly supplied us with that. Young Stalin is brilliantly readable, as intricately plotted and full of detail as a good novel (more Conradian perhaps than Dostoevskian), scrupulously researched, and full of hitherto unknown (or unreported) facts about Stalin's life. Here, at last, are the details of his confused parentage, his connections to the czarist secret police (which Montefiore, unlike many other biographers, judges to have been relatively harmless), the string of women who found him attractive (and the way he paid many of them back once he enjoyed supreme power), and much else that the Soviet authorities concealed for decades but, given the staying power of Russian bureaucracy, never destroyed. Stalin may have expunged millions of people, but paperwork, letters, and lists were sacred, even if hidden.