[.ca] Stalin (ISBN 1842120263)

The beginning:
You will not find a very well written biography. The author is not a writer. Is something like and historician. A second-rate politician starring a great historical period (perestroika) that writes about great men of the Revolution, running through a lot of documentation now known about them. Surely, there will be better works in the future. More findings, more data. This is the beginning. You've got to read it because, if you do this, then will understand better your future readings.

The Monster from Georgia:
This is the best biography of Stalin there is, in my opinion. Volkogonov simply had the access to the kind of materials no one else had. This book takes full advantage of them. It correctly depicts Stalin as a great actor who sold his image to the masses, the image of benevolent and infallible ruler. In contrast to his fascist counterparts, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin did not have a good speaking ability, and often read his boring speeches monotonously. But his self-assured and reassuring monotony came to have a hypnotic effect. His smile and almost goofy mustache and eyebrows covered the soul of a despot. Stalin was a single-minded individual: for him, power came before everything else. A Georgian nationalist who called himself Koba in his youth and resented Russian rule over his people, he rose to become Stalin (man of steel) who ruled over the new Russian Empire called the Soviet Union. Volkogonov gives us the most factual biography yet of the man who slaughtered millions in the name of the workers' paradise and future generations; the man who feared and obsessed over Adolph Hitler and who ultimately defeated him; the man whose cruelty and destruction are a warning to all future generations not to lend a sympathetic ear to promises of future earthly utopias in exchange for absolute power and elimination of civil rights.

Readable historically significant:
There have been a number of biographies written in the west about Stalin the Soviet dictator. This is the first Russian book that is not simply a piece of hackwork. The writer has had full access to all Soviet archives. These archives had been kept from all other writers. The writer was a red army general and the general expectations from the west were that his work would be of poor quality. This book was written with the approval of the Soviet General Staff before the complete collapse of communism. Volkogonov had been a prolific author but his previous works to use the words of the New York Review of Books "none of his previous works had hinted at independence, rigor or critical thought." It was thus a surprise to find that the book departed form the party line and showed independence from the ideas of the old Soviet State. During the writing of the book the author examined thousands of files in which Stalin either ordered the murder of Soviet citizens or agreed to them. The writer's father was in fact one of Stalin's victims and he found out the details of what had happened during his research. After finishing the book he joined Yelstin's government as indicative of his break with the past. Stalin was for his early life a fringe figure of the Bolshevik movement. He rose to prominence as he organized a large number of armed robberies that proved important to the parties' finances. Around the time of the revolution he became a trusted associate of Lenin. After Lenin's death Stalin entrenched himself in the rather unglamorous job of running the bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist Party. The other contenders for leadership took more glamorous positions. Stalin basically was able to stack the organs of power with his men and he seized power murdering his other rivals. Initially Stalin was seen as an economic moderate. He had supported the continuation of a private agricultural sector. By the late twenties and early thirties he decided on a policy of force industrialization. To pay for the imports that were necessary he had to export huge amounts of agricultural products. To do this he introduced collectivization of the farming sector. This was bitterly resented by farmers especially in the Ukraine and Stalin murdered around 3 million farmers by starving them to death. The forced industrialization of Russia proceeded at a breakneck pace with growth rates of around 5% a year. All of the growth however was going back into expansion of secondary industry. This meant that his regime was unpopular and only kept in power because of its security apparatus. In 1934 Stalin's likely successor Kirov was murdered. This set of a number of purges or the random killing of communist party officials. It would seem that the reason for this was to forestall opposition in a desperately unpopular regime. Just before he war some 40,000 army officers were liquidated in further purges. Again these were clearly aimed at keeping the army from opposing the regime. In 1941 Russia was invaded and the first few months were a disaster with some 3 million Soviet troops being captured and the loss of about half of European Russia. Despite this colossal reversal Russia was able to recover and defeat Germany and to the enslave Eastern Europe for forty years. Russians in considering their history prior to Volkogonov have accepted Stalin's crimes. They have however suggested that he has an important place in history as the industrialization in the thirties turned Russia from the weak power which had succumbed to Germany in the first world war to the superpower which went on to dominate the world for forty years. Secondly Stalin's apologists have suggested that his rock solid tyranny was able to keep together Russia in a time of crisis and in the end not only saved itself but to destroy a tyranny far worse. Volkogonov in fact attacks this myth and suggests that the purges and Stalin's actions in 1941 lay at the heart of the military defeat. The book contains no new surprises such as revealing if it was Stalin who killed Kirov. It also does not allow us to quantify Stalin's crimes in any more detail. It is however a readable biography of one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. The tragedy of the last century is of course that its three most significant figures have been criminals.

A four star Stalin:
I am giving this book 4 stars because it tends to be slightlysuperficial in its biographical analysis of Stalin and in itsdescription of the Russian condition the book explores in its 600 pages. The author takes for granted you know the detailed history of Russian and Stalin and therefore glosses over certain events or aspects of events that Stalin engendered. At times you feel left out of the book because the important detail is missing e g a description of the plight of the peasants during the collectivization effort would have been valuable to better understand and feel the malignancy of this action which offended Bukahrin so deeply. You tend to view the man more than get into his skin or even into the hearts and minds of the cast of characters and the evnets the author covers. I feel that I was seriously enlightened by the book and found it valuable. I guessmy problem with it was Volkogonov's style (particularly after reading Pipes' three volumes on the history of Russia...a beautiful writer). Read the book, it's worth it, but it is not a 5 star achievement in general. END

A biography more suited to historians than thegeneral reader:
Gen. Volkogonov is not a professional historian, and certainly not a great writer. His work his well researched and meticolous, but is fails to either capture the general reader or to impress the reader looking for a clear analysis of causes and consequences. The book is very long, the style of prose quite boring and at times repetitive. The author very often has a moralistic tone ("How could Stalin posssibly be so cruel? Look how corrupt his cronies were...") that bothers those who would like a more detached approach. I guess one has to remember that once he believed in Communism and cannot have helped being shocked by what he found in the state's archives (where he ventured with the original purpose of writing an orthodox biography of the Great Leader); this might explain his being upset at Stalin, but does not make the book more appealing. In the end, Gen. Volgokonov's main merit is exactly this: to have been able to access, thanks to his position in the Red Army, the USSR's impenetrable archives, and to have revealed to the world a deluge of details and documents. Some of them are immensely controversial in their potential consequences (eg the statements made by Stalin before the German attack that war was inevitable; or Zukov's plan for a preventive strike against Germany). Indeed, this book deservedly appears in most bibliographies on the USSR and the Russo-German war, and has provided the academic community with valuable insights for further analysis on Stalin and Stalinism. But it is probably more suited for an historian than for a general reader.