Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

In a Levada Center poll in 2017, Russians who responded named Joseph Stalin the “most outstanding person” in world history. Now, you can argue about the meaning of “outstanding”, but it's pretty remarkable that citizens of a country whose chief of government (albeit several regimes ago) presided over an entirely avoidable famine which killed millions of citizens of his country, ordered purges which executed more than 700,000 people, including senior military leadership, leaving his nation unprepared for the German attack in 1941, which would, until the final victory, claim the lives of around 27 million Soviet citizens, military and civilian, would be considered an “outstanding person” as opposed to a super-villain.

The story of Stalin's career is even less plausible, and should give pause to those who believe history can be predicted without the contingency of things that “just happen”. Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (the author uses Roman alphabet transliterations of all individuals' names in their native languages, which can occasionally be confusing when they later Russified their names) was born in 1878 in the town of Gori in the Caucasus. Gori, part of the territory of Georgia which had long been ruled by the Ottoman Empire, had been seized by Imperial Russia in a series of bloody conflicts ending in the 1860s with complete incorporation of the territory into the Czar's empire. Ioseb, who was called by the Georgian dimunitive “Sosa” throughout his youth, was the third son born to his parents, but, as both of his older brothers had died not long after birth, was raised as an only child.

Sosa's father, Besarion Jughashvili (often written in the Russian form, Vissarion) was a shoemaker with his own shop in Gori but, as time passed his business fell on hard times and he closed the shop and sought other work, ending his life as a vagrant. Sosa's mother, Ketevan “Keke” Geladze, was ambitious and wanted the best for her son, and left her husband and took a variety of jobs to support the family. She arranged for eight year old Sosa to attend Russian language lessons given to the children of a priest in whose house she was boarding. Knowledge of Russian was the key to advancement in Czarist Georgia, and he had a head start when Keke arranged for him to be enrolled in the parish school's preparatory and four year programs. He was the first member of either side of his family to attend school and he rose to the top of his class under the patronage of a family friend, “Uncle Yakov” Egnatashvili. After graduation, his options were limited. The Russian administration, wary of the emergence of a Georgian intellectual class that might champion independence, refused to establish a university in the Caucasus. Sosa's best option was the highly selective Theological Seminary in Tiflis where he would prepare, in a six year course, for life as a parish priest or teacher in Georgia but, for those who graduated near the top, could lead to a scholarship at a university in another part of the empire.

He took the examinations and easily passed, gaining admission, petitioning and winning a partial scholarship that paid most of his fees. “Uncle Yakov” paid the rest, and he plunged into his studies. Georgia was in the midst of an intense campaign of Russification, and Sosa further perfected his skills in the Russian language. Although completely fluent in spoken and written Russian along with his native Georgian (the languages are completely unrelated, having no more in common than Finnish and Italian), he would speak Russian with a Georgian accent all his life and did not publish in the Russian language until he was twenty-nine years old.

Long a voracious reader, at the seminary Sosa joined a “forbidden literature” society which smuggled in and read works, not banned by the Russian authorities, but deemed unsuitable for priests in training. He read classics of Russian, French, English, and German literature and science, including [[ASIN:0140445684 Capital]] by Karl Marx. The latter would transform his view of the world and path in life. He made the acquaintance of a former seminarian and committed Marxist, Lado Ketskhoveli, who would guide his studies. In August 1898, he joined the newly formed “Third Group of Georgian Marxists”—many years later Stalin would date his “party card” to then.

Prior to 1905, imperial Russia was an absolute autocracy. The Czar ruled with no limitations on his power. What he decreed and ordered his functionaries to do was law. There was no parliament, political parties, elected officials of any kind, or permanent administrative state that did not serve at the pleasure of the monarch. Political activity and agitation were illegal, as were publishing and distributing any kind of political literature deemed to oppose imperial rule. As Sosa became increasingly radicalised, it was only a short step from devout seminarian to underground agitator. He began to neglect his studies, became increasingly disrespectful to authority figures, and, in April 1899, left the seminary before taking his final examinations.

Saddled with a large debt to the seminary for leaving without becoming a priest or teacher, he drifted into writing articles for small, underground publications associated with the Social Democrat movement, at the time the home of most Marxists. He took to public speaking and, while eschewing fancy flights of oratory, spoke directly to the meetings of workers he addressed in their own dialect and terms. Inevitably, he was arrested for “incitement to disorder and insubordination against higher authority” in April 1902 and jailed. After fifteen months in prison at Batum, he was sentenced to three years of internal exile in Siberia. In January 1904 he escaped and made it back to Tiflis, in Georgia, where he resumed his underground career. By this time the Social Democratic movement had fractured into Lenin's Bolshevik faction and the larger Menshevik group. Sosa, who during his imprisonment had adopted the revolutionary nickname “Koba”, after the hero in a Georgian novel of revenge, continued to write and speak and, in 1905, after the Czar was compelled to cede some of his power to a parliament, organised Battle Squads which stole printing equipment, attacked government forces, and raised money through protection rackets targeting businesses.

In 1905, Koba Jughashvili was elected one of three Bolshevik delegates from Georgia to attend the Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in Tampere, Finland, then part of the Russian empire. It was there he first met Lenin, who had been living in exile in Switzerland. Koba had read Lenin's prolific writings and admired his leadership of the Bolshevik cause, but was unimpressed in this first in-person encounter. He vocally took issue with Lenin's position that Bolsheviks should seek seats in the newly-formed State Duma (parliament). When Lenin backed down in the face of opposition, he said, “I expected to see the mountain eagle of our party, a great man, not only politically but physically, for I had formed for myself a picture of Lenin as a giant, as a stately representative figure of a man. What was my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary individual, below average height, distinguished from ordinary mortals by, literally, nothing.”

Returning to Georgia, he resumed his career as an underground revolutionary including, famously, organising a robbery of the Russian State Bank in Tiflis in which three dozen people were killed and two dozen more injured, “expropriating” 250,000 rubles for the Bolshevik cause. Koba did not participate directly, but he was the mastermind of the heist. This and other banditry, criminal enterprises, and unauthorised publications resulted in multiple arrests, imprisonments, exiles to Siberia, escapes, re-captures, and life underground in the years that followed. In 1912, while living underground in Saint Petersburg after yet another escape, he was named the first editor of the Bolshevik party's new daily newspaper, Pravda, although his name was kept secret. In 1913, with the encouragement of Lenin, he wrote an article titled “Marxism and the National Question” in which he addressed how a Bolshevik regime should approach the diverse ethnicities and national identities of the Russian Empire. As a Georgian Bolshevik, Jughashvili was seen as uniquely qualified and credible to address this thorny question. He published the article under the nom de plume “K. [for Koba] Stalin”, which literally translated, meant “Man of Steel” and paralleled Lenin's pseudonym. He would use this name for the rest of his life, reverting to the Russified form of his given name, “Joseph” instead of the nickname Koba (by which his close associates would continue to address him informally). I shall, like the author, refer to him subsequently as “Stalin”.

When Russia entered the Great War in 1914, events were set into motion which would lead to the end of Czarist rule, but Stalin was on the sidelines: in exile in Siberia, where he spent much of his time fishing. In late 1916, as manpower shortages became acute, exiled Bolsheviks including Stalin received notices of conscription into the army, but when he appeared at the induction centre he was rejected due to a crippled left arm, the result of a childhood injury. It was only after the abdication of the Czar in the February Revolution of 1917 that he returned to Saint Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd, and resumed his work for the Bolshevik cause. In April 1917, in elections to the Bolshevik Central Committee, Stalin came in third after Lenin (who had returned from exile in Switzerland) and Zinoviev. Despite having been out of circulation for several years, Stalin's reputation from his writings and editorship of Pravda, which he resumed, elevated him to among the top rank of the party.

As Kerensky's Provisional Government attempted to consolidate its power and continue the costly and unpopular war, Stalin and Trotsky joined Lenin's call for a Bolshevik coup to seize power, and Stalin was involved in all aspects of the eventual October Revolution, although often behind the scenes, while Lenin was the public face of the Bolshevik insurgency.

After seizing power, the Bolsheviks faced challenges from all directions. They had to disentangle Russia from the Great War without leaving the country open to attack and territorial conquest by Germany or Poland. Despite their ambitious name, they were a minority party and had to subdue domestic opposition. They took over a country which the debts incurred by the Czar to fund the war had effectively bankrupted. They had to exert their control over a sprawling, polyglot empire in which, outside of the big cities, their party had little or no presence. They needed to establish their authority over a military in which the officer corps largely regarded the Czar as their legitimate leader. They must restore agricultural production, severely disrupted by levies of manpower for the war, before famine brought instability and the risk of a counter-coup. And for facing these formidable problems, all at the same time, they were utterly unprepared.

The Bolsheviks were, to a man (and they were all men), professional revolutionaries. Their experience was in writing and publishing radical tracts and works of Marxist theory, agitating and organising workers in the cities, carrying out acts of terror against the regime, and funding their activities through banditry and other forms of criminality. There was not a military man, agricultural expert, banker, diplomat, logistician, transportation specialist, or administrator among them, and suddenly they needed all of these skills and more, plus the ability to recruit and staff an administration for a continent-wide empire. Further, although Lenin's leadership was firmly established and undisputed, his subordinates were all highly ambitious men seeking to establish and increase their power in the chaotic and fluid situation.

It was in this environment that Stalin made his mark as the reliable “fixer”. Whether it was securing levies of grain from the provinces, putting down resistance from counter-revolutionary White forces, stamping out opposition from other parties, developing policies for dealing with the diverse nations incorporated into the Russian Empire (indeed, in a real sense, it was Stalin who invented the Soviet Union as a nominal federation of autonomous republics which, in fact, were subject to Party control from Moscow), or implementing Lenin's orders, even when he disagreed with them, Stalin was on the job. Lenin recognised Stalin's importance as his right hand man by creating the post of General Secretary of the party and appointing him to it.

This placed Stalin at the centre of the party apparatus. He controlled who was hired, fired, and promoted. He controlled access to Lenin (only Trotsky could see Lenin without going through Stalin). This was a finely-tuned machine which allowed Lenin to exercise absolute power through a party machine which Stalin had largely built and operated.

Then, in May of 1922, the unthinkable happened: Lenin was felled by a stroke which left him partially paralysed. He retreated to his dacha at Gorki to recuperate, and his communication with the other senior leadership was almost entirely through Stalin. There had been no thought of or plan for a succession after Lenin (he was only fifty-two at the time of his first stroke, although he had been unwell for much of the previous year). As Lenin's health declined, ending in his death in January 1924, Stalin increasingly came to run the party and, through it, the government. He had appointed loyalists in key positions, who saw their own careers as linked to that of Stalin. By the end of 1924, Stalin began to move against the “Old Bolsheviks” who he saw as rivals and potential threats to his consolidation of power. When confronted with opposition, on three occasions he threatened to resign, each exercise in brinksmanship strengthening his grip on power, as the party feared the chaos that would ensue from a power struggle at the top. His status was reflected in 1925 when the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad.

This ascent to supreme power was not universally applauded. Felix Dzierzynski (Polish born, he is often better known by the Russian spelling of his name, Dzerzhinsky) who, as the founder of the Soviet secret police (Cheka/GPU/OGPU) knew a few things about dictatorship, warned in 1926, the year of his death, that “If we do not find the correct line and pace of development our opposition will grow and the country will get its dictator, the grave digger of the revolution irrespective of the beautiful feathers on his costume.”

With or without feathers, the dictatorship was beginning to emerge. In 1926 Stalin published “On Questions of Leninism” in which he introduced the concept of “Socialism in One Country” which, presented as orthodox Leninist doctrine (which it wasn't), argued that world revolution was unnecessary to establish communism in a single country. This set the stage for the collectivisation of agriculture and rapid industrialisation which was to come. In 1928, what was to be the prototype of the show trials of the 1930s opened in Moscow, the Shakhty trial, complete with accusations of industrial sabotage (“wrecking”), denunciations of class enemies, and Andrei Vyshinsky presiding as chief judge. Of the fifty-three engineers accused, five were executed and forty-four imprisoned. A country desperately short on the professionals its industry needed to develop had begin to devour them.

It is a mistake to regard Stalin purely as a dictator obsessed with accumulating and exercising power and destroying rivals, real or imagined. The one consistent theme throughout Stalin's career was that he was a true believer. He was a devout believer in the Orthodox faith while at the seminary, and he seamlessly transferred his allegiance to Marxism once he had been introduced to its doctrines. He had mastered the difficult works of Marx and could cite them from memory (as he often did spontaneously to buttress his arguments in policy disputes), and went on to similarly internalise the work of Lenin. These principles guided his actions, and motivated him to apply them rigidly, whatever the cost may be.

Starting in 1921, Lenin had introduced the New Economic Policy, which lightened state control over the economy and, in particular, introduced market reforms in the agricultural sector, resulting in a mixed economy in which socialism reigned in big city industries, but in the countryside the peasants operated under a kind of market economy. This policy had restored agricultural production to pre-revolutionary levels and largely ended food shortages in the cities and countryside. But to a doctrinaire Marxist, it seemed to risk destruction of the regime. Marx believed that the political system was determined by the means of production. Thus, accepting what was essentially a capitalist economy in the agricultural sector was to infect the socialist government with its worst enemy.

Once Stalin had completed his consolidation of power, he then proceeded as Marxist doctrine demanded: abolish the New Economic Policy and undertake the forced collectivisation of agriculture. This began in 1928.

And it is with this momentous decision that the present volume comes to an end. This massive work (976 pages) is just the first in a planned three volume biography of Stalin. The second volume, [[ASIN:0143132156 Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941]], was published in 2017 and the concluding volume is not yet completed.

Reading this book, and the entire series, is a major investment of time in a single historical figure. But, as the author observes, if you're interested in the phenomenon of twentieth century totalitarian dictatorship, Stalin is the gold standard. He amassed more power, exercised by a single person with essentially no checks or limits, over more people and a larger portion of the Earth's surface than any individual in human history. He ruled for almost thirty years, transformed the economy of his country, presided over deliberate famines, ruthless purges, and pervasive terror that killed tens of millions, led his country to victory at enormous cost in the largest land conflict in history and ended up exercising power over half of the European continent, and built a military which rivaled that of the West in a bipolar struggle for global hegemony.

It is impossible to relate the history of Stalin without describing the context in which it occurred, and this is as much a history of the final days of imperial Russia, the revolutions of 1917, and the establishment and consolidation of Soviet power as of Stalin himself. Indeed, in this first volume, there are lengthy parts of the narrative in which Stalin is largely offstage: in prison, internal exile, or occupied with matters peripheral to the main historical events. The level of detail is breathtaking: the Bolsheviks seem to have been as compulsive record-keepers as Germans are reputed to be, and not only are the votes of seemingly every committee meeting recorded, but who voted which way and why. There are more than two hundred pages of end notes, source citations, bibliography, and index.

If you are interested in Stalin, the Soviet Union, the phenomenon of Bolshevism, totalitarian dictatorship, or how destructive madness can grip a civilised society for decades, this is an essential work. It is unlikely it will ever be equalled.

Exceedingly informative. Many historical nuggets to mine but exceedingly tedious. A wonderful research text.

Terms such as "magisterial" and "profound" are distributed these days with such regularity that they are often meaningless. But that is not the case with Stephen Kotkin's biography of the 20th century Russian dictator, which, for the post part, deserves all the praise it has gathered. As the work opens, the author provides us with a summary of the life of the young Josif Djugashvili and his emergence from the semi-medieval Georgian border zone of the Russian empire which he did so much to destroy. "Soso," as he was known to his friends, entered a regimented seminary to prepare for the priesthood, but converted in his teenage years from Eastern Orthodox Christianity to a new belief system then gaining traction in the empire. This new religion was Marxism, which Kotkin shows formed Stalin's frame of reference and the core of his political thinking, and to which he adhered, with varying degrees of fanaticism and pragmatism, for the rest of his life. Far from being a "grey blur," as his earlier enemies characterized him, Stalin, in Kotkin's version, was a highly intelligent, extremely well-read autodidact who was intimately conversant with the postulates and nuances of the new "faith", and could wield them like a rapier in polemics against his opponents. Here, we don't yet see Stalin the monster, but Stalin the shmoozing politician, "morose" at some times, but more often conveying a communist message that resonated with his colleagues and especially with the younger Bolsheviks. We all know the end of the story, but during the timeframe covered by Kotkin (until 1928) many of these people "liked" Stalin (or at least couldn't see their way through a host of problems without him). We even see a vignette of Stalin's "empathy", a trait not usually credited to the eventual murderer of millions, yet a (small) part of his complex character. We observe Stalin, growing in power, outmaneuvering the aloof, condescending ultra-leftist Trotsky, the "hero" of the Russian Civil War, yet not personally "liked" by the majority of the Bolsheviks, partly because he was Jewish (though totally Russified) but mostly because he didn't have the people skills Stalin did. But exactly what those skills were the sources don't tell us, so unfortunately, Kotkin can't either. So how did Stalin become the paranoid monster that he certainly was during his later career? Kotkin gratefully eschews pop psychology answers (e.g., his father Beso beat him as a boy) for a more complex and nuanced explanation. He infers that Stalin the monster was made, not born, and that his later behavior was more a function of the people he had to deal with and the times and system in which he lived--though paradoxically he had much to do with creating those times and that system.
In truth, this book might be more accurately titled "The Life and Times of Stalin," as in much of it, Stalin makes only a brief appearance, especially during the October Revolution that brought the Bolseviks to power. Here again, the sources are slim indeed. Not being a Russian scholar, I cannot comment on the scholarship in this work, but to the lay reader, it seems quite impressive. Some sections are especially vivid; these include the reconquest of the former tsarist empire by the Bolsheviks, a subject which is glossed over in all other biographies of Stalin I've read, and the recounting of the expedition against the bizarre, sadistic Baron Ungarn-Sternberg, the would-be ruler of outer Mongolia, a remote country which eventually became the first Soviet satellite.
So why didn't I give this truly magisterial work five stars? There are several reasons, the foremost of which is that it is by no means easy to read this book. It is so dense with details and dates that sometimes the narrative is difficult to follow Also, if you don't already have a very good general idea of who Zinoviev and Kamenev, or Trotsky and Molotov were, or care what Bolshevik did what to who on August 21 as opposed to August 23, or are aware of what happens to all the historical characters after the book ends, this work can get confusing in a hurry. So if you decide to delve into this tome (my delving took about 3 weeks and I did read every page, though not every one was equally pleasurable), make sure Wikipedia is close at hand. But if you can put up with all of the detail and the scholarship, you'll have a real treasure in your hands, one that presents a fascinating view of one of the most despicable, yet important historical figures of the 20th century and of the forces that propelled him in that direction.

To many history and to little of his life

Kotkin has an excellent book with vast quantities of detail on what he terms the gold standard of tyranny. One of the things I like about the book is that he discounts the psycho-babble of Stalin's childhood. Stalin is portrayed as the good student seminarian who liked to sing, who gets his first taste of revolutionary ideas while in the seminary and deeply feels the social injustice all around him. Kotkin discounts the bank robber Koba, which on its face is ridiculous. Someone with Stalin's physical handicaps isn't going to make a good bank robber. We see Stalin standing out from other Georgians and Armenians by being a Bolshevik, coming to Lenin's attention as such and being given a boost. Stalin is Lenin's creature. Stalin ingratiates himself with Lenin. Stalin is not effective during the Civil War, but instead is put into an administrative post where he is effective. He then becomes secretary of the party and afterwards makes this into his power position and can weave webs of information and influence throughout the government and the party simultaneously and far more effectively who do not realize how to build power within this new environment. It is an excellent analysis.
The only negative is the writing itself. It is not always clear. It is not eloquent. Or perhaps Figes has spoiled me.

Seizing power while thoroughly confused: the triumph of people skills.
I have been looking for a satisfactory Stalin bio for some time. Trotsky's version doesn't lack interest, but it is obviously 'party' and unreliable. More recent attempts didn't quite sit well with me. Is this new one better? The author explains that he wanted to combine the genres of biography and historiography .... Why would that need to be said, isn't it obvious? It did need to be said, because the actual biography is maybe only half of the book.

On the positive side: The author doesn't generally make things up that he cannot know. He tries to avoid biographic fiction. No intrapolations, no novelistic assumptions about unmapped waters. But: The effect is a bland flatness, mostly during the early chapters. Not enough source material on the man, for sure. At times one wonders if Kotkin followed the official court publications on the great man more than we needed him to.
The re-telling of Russian history in the late 19th and early 20th century, up to the revolution, is rather pedestrian. I didn't often have the feeling that I learned something new, nor that things were presented in a particularly interesting manner.

Political observation on the years before the revolution: the cohesion of the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual empire was more threatened by Russian nationalism than by non-Russian nationalisms. I will let this stand without further discussion, assuming that similar forces are at play today, in the post Soviet world with its assorted conflicts.

Pre-revolution comment on Stalin: a man of no particular relevance, who got moved into central roles by circumstances. Do we believe in coincidences or in accidental developments? We should, because the verdict on Lenin isn't much different: 'whatever Lenin's charisma and encapsulation talents, much of his power would derive from events going his way.'
Kotkin ascribes Stalin's success in rising to the top to his people skills, his ability to play the apparatus. He sees Trotsky falsified: Stalin created the machine, not the other way. Kotkin says: Stalin liked the job and he did the job. Easy explanation.

I am always a firm believer in the power of luck. As Kotkin writes: 'that such lowly beginnings would lead to one of the strongest dictatorships in the world was beyond fantastic'. He compares the absurdity of the early post revolution efforts to the school of Dada, though humor and irony were entirely lacking among Bolsheviks. With some logic, they escaped their Dada phase by the invention and perfecting of revolutionary terror.

The book heated up for me with the chapter on nationalism/nationalities after the revolution. Stalin was in the thick of events. Several pieces of the Russian empire broke away, such as Finland, Poland, Belorussia, the Baltic states, Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus states. The Red Army re-conquered some, but not all. These historical conflicts are of utmost importance for our understanding of the present problems with 'New Russia'.

Is it time worth spending? Depends. If you are intrigued by the puzzle, how order of a kind grew out of abject dark chaos, you find some answers here. What about the writing, does the book stand out? No, it doesn't, no real extra merits on that front.
Also, the editing for the next edition needs to remove some minor hiccups.

The story of Stalin's formative years and rise to power in the revolutionary totalitarian state he helped build. The book usefully blends biography with contextual history to help explain how a complex interaction of personal and social factors (together with a good helping of chance) produced far reaching consequences. Though at times I felt I couldn't bear more arcana of Bolshevik infighting, overall I found the author's detailed history of the revolution, its antecedents, and its process of consolidation extremely useful in understanding the origin and nature of Stalin's remarkable victories over competitors and enemies. Although I found Stalin no less a monster-in-the-making, compared with the other accounts of him that I've read this book gave me entirely fresh insights into his special talents and abilities: an enormous capacity for work (often of the most mind-numbingly bureaucratic kind), a tireless drive for control, an intense interest in ideas, a very solid, if not brilliant, intelligence, and an unmatched capacity for mastering and exploiting the details and evolving rituals of dogmatic Marxism-Leninism (interestingly relying on much the same talents and tendencies that had led him earlier to study for the priesthood). On the negative side, while the author’s style is entirely functional, he can be repetitious, and he sometimes slips into oddly inappropriate colloquialisms. Overall, however, this is a fascinating and enormously informative achievement that makes me look forward to the next installment.

Princeton professor Stephen Kotkin sure knows how to tell a story. In his nearly 1000 page (in the print edition) biography, and remember this is just Volume 1, describes and analyzes the rise to power of Joseph Stalin from his humble beginnings in the Georgian backwater town of Gori in 1879 to his full assumption of power over the Soviet Union in 1928 on the eve of the collectivization of Russian agriculture. As any good Marxist would do he analyzes Stalin’s rise in the context of the broad historical forces shaping Europe and Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, this is a story where the force of will of two individuals, namely Lenin and Stalin, alter the arc of history. Simply put, without them, no Soviet Union.

Because much of the story is known and is present in other reviews on Amazon, I will highlight what I found special in Kotkin’s biography. First and foremost the autodidact Stalin, who was far from the intellectual lightweight portrayed by his critics, was from the beginning a hard leftist. Nevertheless he learned from Lenin the importance of tactical flexibility. This enabled him to turn right to defeat Trotsky and then turn left to defeat, first Zinoviev and Kamenev, and then Bukharin. If anything Kotkin teaches us the Stalin was the true successor to Lenin.

He further highlights how Stalin built a dictatorship within the dictatorship. By that he means that Stalin seized control of the Communist Party which dictated over all of Russia. Through his role as general secretary Stalin seized control of the party, which was internally democratic, and bent it to his will. Thus he created a dictatorship within a dictatorship.

Here are a few interesting factoids that I learned from the book:
*Lenin’s Testament was probably not written by Lenin. It was written by, most likely, his wife.

*With respect to his wife, unlike other leading Bolsheviks Stalin was a sexist in the sense he did not want her to work outside the home. For a while she was a secretary to Lenin.

*Finance Commissar Grigory Sokolnikov broke the Russian inflation with a very orthodox monetary policy putting the country on a modified gold standard. He minted gold coins with an engraving of the deposed Czar Nicholas II on it. This was done with the backing of Stalin. Sokolnikov is later a victim of the terror.

*Vladimir Putin’s grandfather worked as cook for Lenin.

Stalin was a true party boss. Harry Truman described him “as near like Tom Pendergast (Kansas city Democratic Party boss) as any man I know.” The difference, of course, is that Pendergast did not control the entire security apparatus of the state. This control will be wreaked with a vengeance in Kotkin’s next volume. I can’t wait for it to come out.

A most impressive first volume of a massive biography/history. Very well written; biography with the sweep of history in the same package. I found many new insights and descriptions of complex facts, even for a reader familiar with the subject matter. Not to be missed by those interested in the enormous historical impact of the man and the regime.

If I have, reluctantly, any criticism to offer it is this: in my opinion, as a lay reader, not a scholar, the book could have been shortened appreciably without eliminating anything of critical importance. Scholars and many lay readers may disagree.

The first volume of a masterpiece. Gives insights into Stalin the man. Everything else published on him is a caricature by comparison.