The story is based on true events and is led by a man named Koba who becomes Stalin. The characters are some who would take place in the active role of the revolution and also you see what will take place after some of these people are put into power and that some of the people that helped with getting them into power and knowing how they got there needs to be dealt with. This all led to why people were killed later and the fear that some people lived with. A good story that just took me a while to get used to all of the characters, once I did I found this to be a good read.

The Outfit is a short novel focussing on the great Tiflis bank robbery of 1906, a kind of companion volume to Stephen May’s Sell us the Rope, featuring the gangster Koba, nom-de-guerre of the man later called Stalin. The young Stalin describes this robbery in Sell us the Rope, but Tallerman’s novel is centred on the personalities of the Outfit, the revolutionary gang guilty of the raid. Where May’s novel is set at the Communist Party conference in London, attended by Stalin and Lenin, this conference is mentioned only in passing in Tallerman’s book.

Let’s be clear, both books are great: Tallerman’s is a short, witty read, focussing more on Koba’s companions than on Koba himself. Of these the most interesting is Kamo, a notorious Georgian bandit, who in the midst of the blood and mayhem of the robbery, has time to wonder where Koba has taken himself off to. This game old brigand almost blows himself up when making a bomb in the early chapters, and is ultimately himself a victim of his erstwhile comrade, Josef Stalin.

This is an entertaining, amusing novel, based on fact, which summons the reader to pre-revolutionary Georgia and the formative years of Soviet communism.

I cannot resist a something like "how Stalin robbed a bank" and had to read it because I love this type of stories.
It was a lot of fun but i also appreciated the well researched historical background.
The fictional Stalin is well developed and the flow kept me reading.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Does history repeat itself? Humans as a famous Doctor once said love to see patterns that are not here but in reality, you can see certain repetitions not just in counties but those who play key roles. You may spot a certain Prime Minister has a long history of telling lies in their job that lead to their downfall perhaps or national tensions that lead to tragedies again and again. Reading David Tallerman’s fascinating novella The Outfit or more accurately The Outfit: The Absolutely True Story of the Time Joseph Stalin Robbed A Bank we get to witness a lesser-known piece of history, but we also just possibly see the signs that definitely explain what was to come.

Its 1907 in pre-revolutionary Russia. Lenin works hard to keep the flame of change growing but as many political parties find this requires money and even as we know today some parties won’t ask too many questions where the money will come from…A young man known for enjoying the fighting side of being a revolutionary while also some cunning has a plan – Joseph Djugashvili aka Koba and one day will be known as Stalin. In Georgia there will be a large amount of money entering the town of Tiflis that could fund the revolution and may further cement Koba’s reputation and place in the wider command. He assembles an unusual mix of revolutionaries which will involve to various degrees poetry, double-crossing, bombs, and a mattress.

In many ways this is reading a heist story. We soon get to know the revolutionaries that are nicknamed the outfit and very quickly we get Koba but also bomb-maker Kato. Kato is the larger-than-life character happier making bombs, going for glory with an imperviousness to pain and perhaps a lack of common sense that makes him feel on the edge of dangerousness. Koba in contrast is a disquieting lead. We soon find everything from relationships, politics and his own Outfit really serve only one purpose - his own. He’s not yet sure of what he will ultimately become but he clearly wants to be on the top table with Lenin and nothing and no one will stand in his way. He will happily remove weak Outfit members, lie to the secret police; and yet also create cunning strategies for a heist that make you soon see the shadow of what he will become. Tallerman uses these two as nice counterweights to each other one the very over the top characters who jumps off the page and in contrast the sinister shadow that you start to feel nervous about exactly what he will do next. As most of us don’t know what actually happens in this robbery that means we are unsure who will survive and how ruthless Koba will get.

The heist is neatly done we get to meet the team and watch the manoeuvring to set things up and then everything kicks off in the finale. What I really appreciate is how Tallerman gives us a feel for the time. Secret police everywhere, harsh poverty under the Tsars and then throws in lots of colour. Did you know Stalin write poetry for example? We have this pre-car time where horse and carriages carry money but with mounted guns; secret societies and a feeling of the world getting ready to explode. High stakes but also the Outfit is more super enthusiastic people wanting a change but not necessarily skilled professionals. Kato is more a loose cannon in situations than a professional soldier. But what I did like is the foreshadowing of the future. We see there is always a secret police knowing everyone and ready to descend and take people away. We also see the revolutionaries while focus on the prize won’t necessarily avoid innocent people getting caught in the bloodshed. There is a finally a neat coda exploring Koba and Kato’s futures that in many ways just reaffirms what we always suspected about both character’s natures.

Historical fiction fans who enjoy lots of action should find this novella well worth a look. Unusual; fill of true facts about the time and a neat snapshot of someone who will become a huge dark figure of history means it’s a short but chewy read that may make you consider exactly how far the seeds of any event are planted

There are few more towering figures in 20th-century history than Joseph Stalin. The Soviet dictator ruled his country with an iron fist, and while estimates of the deaths he caused vary widely, a credible figure is 20 million. A true monster, he would only have continued had he not died. Prior to his passing, he was readying a show trial of nine doctors, seven of them Jewish, and some believe it would have been the prelude to a wider campaign of violence, perhaps even genocide, against Russia’s Jewish population.

So, how did this man come to seize the Soviet throne? How was he able to supplant all his rivals, not least Leon Trotsky, to become unassailable for over thirty years? As with the Second World War, or the rise of the Nazis and Hitler, readers might presume there is nothing left to be written about these events. But as with many authors writing on these subjects, David Tallerman has discovered untapped territory. His historical novella focuses on one small but key event in the history of Stalin’s rise: the time he masterminded a bank heist.

In 1907, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvil, was yet to be Stalin. His parents’ only child to survive infancy, they nicknamed him Soso (a diminutive of Ioseb). Later, after enrolling in a seminary to train to become a priest, he joined a forbidden book club and adopted the nom de guerre Koba, from the bandit protagonist of Alexander Kazbegi’s novel, The Patricide. After abandoning the priesthood, he lived up to his namesake and was linked to The Outfit, a band of revolutionary outlaws who robbed and pillaged throughout the city of Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, but back then part of the Imperial Russian Empire).

David Tallerman’s novella opens with Koba meeting with Lenin in Tammerfors, a city in southern Finland. They are attending a Bolshevik conference and the Georgian bandit is rough and coarse in comparison with the intellectual revolutionary leadership. But Lenin takes him aside and encourages him to not just keep on committing robberies for the cause, but to escalate what they refer to as expropriations. Koba returns to Tiflis under no illusion that fulfilling Lenin’s wish will be his ticket into the upper echelons of the movement.

In Tiflis, Koba meets up with The Outfit, amongst whose number is Simon Arshaki Ter-Petrosian, who goes by the nom de guerre, Kamo. The leader of The Outfit is Kote Tsintsadze, but he is reticent about Koba’s plans to seek bigger targets. It isn’t long before he’s arrested by the Okhrana, the Czar’s hated secret police. Kamo takes charge; he is someone with far fewer scruples, a lust for excitement, and a very high threshold for physical pain. Koba, meanwhile, befriends a bank clerk and learns of a large transport of money. Kamo and The Outfit now plan the heist.

David Tallerman has written a novella which truly brings history alive. In an Afterword, he writes that unlike many writers working on stories based on historical events; he wasn’t faced with too little source material, and hence the need to take fictional flights of fancy, but too much. Indeed, he lists just two scenes in which he exercised creative licence. One of these, a confrontation between a fictional police officer (the only made-up character in the narrative), and Kamo and one of his acolytes at a train station in the heist’s aftermath, is grounded heavily in real events. The other, how the money was moved from Kamo’s hideout to where it was secreted, he needed to fictionalise who transported it and how. But apart from this, the rest of the narrative is based on historical sources.

While the events depicted are undoubtedly gripping, the novella’s strongest feature is its cast of characters. The well-known cliché fact is stranger than fiction is truly apt here. Kamo has been lost to history and Tellerman deserves praise for bringing him back. Indeed, in the afterword, he rightly says that he’s deserving of his own book. A violent but highly intelligent criminal, he took delight in adopting disguises and befuddling the Czar’s forces. In later life, during the civil war which broke out immediately after the revolution of 1917, he became a brutal Red Army commander. He’d test new recruits by faking their capture and having them dragged into the forest. Those who were stoical in the face of execution, he let live. Those who showed fear, he executed for real. Then there was the occasion he cut open a man’s chest to pull his heart from its cavity.

But while Kamo steals the limelight, this story is really about Kober, because the reader knows he will become the monster who caused the Soviet Union, and indeed the world, so much pain and terror. Yet he’s absent from much of the narrative, and belies expectation by, mostly, keeping his hands clean. How does he manage this? The author has him as an informant for the Okhrana and certainly, there is much in the historical record to suggest he was. But if so, as portrayed in this novella, he played them at their own game and very much made them serve his purposes. Because what comes out of The Outfit very well is how cunning the future Stalin was.

At the outset of Tellerman’s story, at the conference in Tammerfors, the intellectuals of the Bolshevik high command regard Koba with embarrassment, if not contempt. Of course, as readers, we know many of them will die at his hands, having been forced to “confess” their crimes in show trials. But all that’s for the future and as the narrative unfolds, readers are introduced to a gruff and unpolished bandit, yes. But one who outwitted his contemporaries, such as Kamo, his enemies in the Okhrana, and his superiors in the Bolshevik leadership. Always one step ahead, Koba orchestrated events masterfully, pulled off a successful heist, and bought his way to a prominence which would eventually allow him to secure his horrifying destiny.

A bore, if there ever was one.

The robbery by the Bolsheviks would be fertile material, you might think. Tallerman thinks otherwise, and writes the most dreary, dull sequence-of-events telling of the incident. There's little to cheer for in "The Outfit" - the writing is unappealing in style and has little design or structure to it, because there is little build-up, littler character building, and no sense of any emotion known to people in the pages of the book.

Thanks, Rebellion and NetGalley, for the ARC.

My thanks both NetGalley and the Publisher Rebellion for an advanced copy of this historical fiction crime story.

Robbers, Russians, rubles and revolutionaries. These are all at the center of David Tallerman's The Outfit: The Absolutely True Story of the Time Joseph Stalin Robbed a Bank, a fictional retelling of the biggest bank robbery in the country of Georgia's history. Of interest is the that the mastermind of the crime was Joseph Djugashvili, better known to the world as Joseph Stalin, former Premier of the Soviet Union, and a diverse cast of characters .

The book begins with Stalin wanting to find a way of funding the revolution, and bringing some prestige onto himself. After making contact with an old school friend, who remembers Stalin as a writer of poetry and not as the sly heroic revolutionary Stalin had reinvented himself to be, a plan is hatched for a bank withdrawal, with violence. More members are brought into the plan, a vaguely psychotic fellow revolutionary, some beautiful women and lots and lots of explosives. High jinks ensue.

The novel is short, more a novella, and moves very quick, with a lot of jumps, and little sometimes little explanation. If this was a heist movie, think Michael Bay more than Michael Mann. However the story does move, the robbery is exciting and very action filled and well written. The characters are amusing, and keep the the reader entertained, though most of them are really, really awful people.

A fun quick read, about a real incident in the life of a horrible man. Stalin comes across as you would expect, untrustworthy and deceptive to all, but the robbery is interesting, as is the brief descriptions of the times, and other events that occur around the theft. Recommended for crime fans, historical fiction fans and for fans who like a little bit more true in their crime novels.

Joseph Djugashvili - soon to be known to history as Joseph Stalin - plans to pull off the biggest bank robbery ever to aid Lenin’s revolution in David Tallerman’s “The Outfit”, a glorious romp of a novel which also features Lenin and a motley band of revolutionaries in a crazy heist story set in revolutionary Russia. This is the true story of The Outfit - think Ocean’s Eleven meets Dr. Zhivago - and how they carried out one of the most daring and brutal bank raids in history.
I absolutely loved this book. The narrative is brisk and the action scenes are vivid and dynamic. Tallerman writes well, making the story a joy to read; it may be a short book but it has great depth, with the genesis of the revolution set against the omnipresent threat of the Tsarist secret police like a shadow over everyday Russian life. Not a word is wasted by Tallerman as he depicts the days leading up to the robbery, the heist itself and its aftermath.
The characters are superbly realised. David Tallerman skilfully paints the calculating Stalin as someone who is at least an antihero, because it would be difficult to make a legitimate hero out of him, and yet we find ourselves cautiously rooting for him, even as his “future self” comes ever more to the fore. His crazy associate Kamo, leader of the Outfit, has some wickedly funny passages devoted to him, and his zealous desire for immediate action contrasts with the more cautious Stalin’s. However, events conspire to completely alter their relationship and the mechanics of the heist as Stalin makes a deal with the Devil.
At turns laugh out loud funny and shockingly serious, “The Outfit” is a supremely enjoyable, well-written tale made even more irresistible due to it being true, and I devoured it in one sitting.

I really wanted to like this book and some of the writing was funny and smart but over all it just wasn’t that exciting or interesting. A missed,opportunity but would give Tallerman another shot.