GOVERNMENT BY GANGSTERS: STALIN.

GOVERNMENT BY GANGSTERS: STALIN. Orlando Figes, in a review of YOUNG STALIN by Simon Sebag Montefiore, in the current New York Review of Books, says that “we have come to see the young Stalin as a mediocrity” because of the writings of his enemies, especially Trotsky. Instead, Figes says, Montefiore’s books show Stalin as a leader of a gang of ruffians in his teens and, by his early twenties (in 1901), the leader of a gang that “ran protection rackets and controlled the streets in the workers’ districts of Tiflis.” That is, putting ideology aside, Stalin is an example consistent with the proposition that much of the government in the world can be illuminated by Mafia models. Extralegal gangs govern, collecting taxes in the form of protection, large areas of the world today, including even small pockets of the United States (consider Los Angeles and Chicago).