Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator

I thought this would be a book about Stalin's life in detail, his family, etc.It turned out to be an in-depth study of the development of the communist idealism, it's enemies, and how Stalin himself both used it as a weapon against his numerous enemies, and how he was even victimized by it himself (although much of the victimization was self-induced and/or inflicted).It's slow reading and can be a bit tiresome as it can be (perhaps) a little too in-depth about the philosophies of communism.I would recommend taking a trip down to your local library if you want to read it, or to buy it used. (Don't spend a lot of money for this book).

Not your standard chronological order biography, the author has chosen to present the life of Stalin using two parallel narrative tracks. At first glance this may seem like an odd approach, but it works, and it breaks the monotony of a strictly chronological approach. Having tried to plow through Radinsky's tedious and erratic biographies of Josef Stalin, I was hoping for something better. This book delivers that and more. A very enjoyable, if depressing, look at the life of a sociopath dictator.

Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, Robert Service, Stephen Kotkin, Robert Conquest, and Simon Sebag Montefiore have all produced widely-read accounts of Joseph Stalin’s life. They’re among scores of others. In fact, Amazon dredges up more than 1,000 titles in response to the query “Stalin biography.” Why, then, is yet a new biography of the man necessary? The Russian historian who wrote it explains that “in today’s Russia . . . Stalin’s image is primarily being shaped by pseudo-scholarly apologias.”Rejecting an “alternative” StalinThis “large-scale poisoning of minds with myths of an ‘alternative’ Stalin” prompted him to write his sixth book on the man. And Oleg Khlevniuk may well be the world’s leading expert on Joseph Stalin, having dedicated more than two decades to studying his life. His “new biography,” published in 2015, benefits from the opening of Soviet archives and his own seemingly obsessive pursuit of other original sources. While the book is not an easy read, it may be as close to an authoritative and well-balanced picture of the man who ruled the USSR as a dictator from 1928 to his death in 1953.The harsh reality of Stalin’s ruleTo the West, Joseph Stalin was a monster who was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Khlevniuk does not shy away from this reality. “Official records show,” he writes, “that approximately eight hundred thousand people were shot [on Stalin’s orders] between 1930 and 1952.” But that number only hints at the wider truth. “Between 1930 and 1952, some 20 million people were sentenced to incarceration in labor camps, penal colonies, or prisons. During that same period no fewer than 6 million, primarily ‘kulaks‘ and members of ‘oppressed peoples,’ were subjected to . . . forced resettlement to a remote area of the USSR. “On average, over the more than twenty-year span of Stalin’s rule, 1 million people were shot, incarcerated, or deported to barely habitable areas of the Soviet Union every year.”And these numbers don’t include the seven to ten million people who died in the Great Famine in Ukraine—or the twenty-seven million people who lost their lives in the country in World War II, many of them needlessly as a result of blunders by Stalin.The death of Stalin is a linchpin for the storyAt its core, Khlevniuk’s Stalin is a conventional political biography, chronologically ordered. But its six chapters alternate with interludes that use Stalin’s death and the events surrounding it as a device to explore the dictator’s family life and the way he conducted himself on a daily basis. The book opens on the evening of February 28, 1953, at Stalin’s home near Moscow. The five men who govern the Soviet Union—ostensibly as a collective known as “the Five”—are at dinner. As the author explains how Stalin relates to them, we learn how terrified all four of the others are. But this is the last time they will meet for dinner.After they leave, sometime in the early hours of the morning of March 1, the seventy-four-year-old Stalin suffers a devastating stroke that leaves him immobile and alone. Subsequent interludes reveal how he lay dying for hours, with everyone in his entourage afraid to intrude. It’s a brutally effective portrayal. And Khlevniuk’s account proceeds to relate the great speed with which the men around Stalin moved to undo many of the harsh and counterproductive policies he’d pursued.Nearly four decades to rise to unchallenged controlIn the main body of the book’s text, Khlevniuk describes—sometimes in mind-numbing details—Stalin’s twenty-year rise to a position as “one of Lenin’s closest associates” and the power politics that consumed the Soviet leadership for years after Lenin’s death in 1924. Most accounts of Soviet history report that Stalin had clawed his way to unchallenged command of the Party and the government by 1928. But the author suggests that time didn’t arrive until 1937. The Great Purge (or Red Terror) eliminated any hint of potential opposition as Stalin methodically murdered his Bolshevik colleagues, one after another, only to replace them with younger men who were beholden only to him.That shift to inexperienced and sometimes incompetent men sorely tested Stalin’s ability to respond once Nazi Germany attacked in July 1941. Khlevniuk’s account explains in great detail in his depiction of the disbelief, shock, and inaction with which Stalin and his close associates greeted the arrival of the invading German armies. He writes, “There is no serious basis for revising the traditional view that Stalin was fatally indecisive and even befuddled in the face of the growing Nazi threat.”A balanced portrayal of Stalin’s lifeMost accounts of the life of Stalin imply that his paranoid personality and lack of compassion stem from the brutal circumstances of his upbringing. He is commonly portrayed as an ignorant thug. Khlevniuk dispels that notion. He writes, “By many measures, Stalin’s childhood was ordinary or even comfortable.” His mother could read and fiercely pursued all possibilities for him to receive an education. Because he was a “model student” and his mother used all the resources at her disposal, Stalin benefited from ten years of religious education, including four in a seminary—he was studying for the priesthood—and gained a lifelong love of reading.He was also well-traveled early in his life, visiting Stockholm, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Krakow. Apparently, too, he could read English, French, and German to some extent. For a time before the Revolution, he was the editor of Pravda. And he had a prodigious memory. The man was formidable. In most respects, it was difficult to distinguish him from the middle-class intellectuals who predominated in the Bolshevik leadership—other than that he was just a little smarter than most.About the authorWikipedia notes that Oleg V. Khlevniuk (1959-) “is a historian and a senior researcher at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. Much of his writing on Stalinist Soviet Union is based on newly released archival documents, including personal correspondence, drafts of Central Committee paperwork, new memoirs, and interviews with former functionaries and the families of Politburo members.” Stalin is his sixth book.

Evil is endlessly fascinating. Explaining and contextualizing it preoccupies legions of theologians and historians. Two of the worst of the bad bunch inflicted themselves on millions of hapless people in the near-term past: Hitler and Stalin. These two seem to be the epitomes of ruthless and rationalized mass murder and their acolytes are still active and, in some cases, gaining traction. Shortly after the demise of the USSR, ripples of nostalgia for Comrade Stalin and the earth-shaking power of the "Evil Empire" have, under Putin, become small waves. So, this is a source of concern for many who worry that "history repeats itself" and they'd best "know the enemy" by reading about him Likely, there's no better starting point than Khlevniuk's brief biography.The space between heavy academic tomes and fluffy overviews of historical figures oftentimes isn't too big. In the case of Stalin, there are plenty of both the former and the latter generally aren't worth bothering to read. Historical novels convey some useful impressions, but the fictionalized aspects tend to be judgemental or sensational or simple fantasy. The real beauty of Khlevniuk's work is its brevity. As the author acknowledges in the informative introductory section, many editorial decisions were required on what to include, what to omit and how much detail to provide. He seems to have found the perfect balance.The author employs an interesting structure, using the framework of Stalin's death in 1953 as the touch-point for the narrative. Stalin's life and career unfold in detail but Khlevniuk avoids the pitfall of psychological analysis ("Why did Stalin turn out that way?") because that crucial question can never really be answered any more than a categorical explanation of "Why did Hitler turn out that way?" can be found. There were certain influences and contemporary events for context, but there were others in similar circumstances that didn't "turn out that way", too.Stalin's legacy is thoroughly polluted by his crimes, but what of his accomplishments? He did rocket the near-feudal Russia of the tsars into the ranks of advanced industrialized countries in a very short time span. He created one of the most sophisticated and accomplished militaries in the world and expanded the Empire to cover a significant part of Europe and Asia. His ideology attracted sympathizers worldwide. He beat the Nazi war machine into dust. However, the accompanying crimes, the needless and grotesque waste of human lives and profligate squandering of resources coupled with the totalitarian police state he helmed tarnish all these accomplishments, as Khlevniuk carefully documents.One cannot detract from Stalin's brilliance as a dictator. He eliminated all rivals (real and imagined) and cemented his hold to the point where even his most trusted acolytes cowered at his death bed. More dubious were his skills as a military leader. Initially, Stalin handicapped the Red Army by destroying its founder (Trotsky), decapitating its leadership, decimating its ranks of experienced soldiers and ignoring capable professional advice. Thus, the debacle of the Nazi invasion was amplified by his incompetence (previously demonstrated during the Civil War), his arrogance and his loss of equilibrium in face of the Wehrmacht onslaught added to the disaster. Yet, as the war progressed, the soon-to-be Marshal of the Soviet Union gained confidence, experience and understanding...though he did not let up on his murderous proclivities visited on his own people: internal exile, deportations, arrests for captured soldiers, death for those who retreated and so on.As to Stalin's legacy, it's not a good one for his comrades (only Kaganovitch lived to see the near demise of the Bolshevik enterprise), his people or the subjugated nations . Maybe, like Mao, techniques like those used in Russia were needed to create the modern USSR. Maybe not, but this book helps the open-minded reader with the knowledge and context needed to establish his/her own judgement on the matter. Koba (as he was known to his closest comrades) remained King until the end. This is the "Goldilocks" of biographies: not too long, not too short...just right! I doubt there is a better balanced and more trenchantly presented biography of Comrade Marshal Stalin than this one.

Having recently had the trauma of reading the beginning of Stephen cock kins absolutely dreadful, rubbish, popularist drivel biography of Stalin I did not know what I was expecting with this book. I certainly did not expect it to be the best written biography I have ever read of anybody. The format is just superb. The way he into links between the last two days of Stalin‘s death and telling his life story. Really well done.There is nothing particularly new in the content, although his heavy reliance on archives means that it is more factual than some. I really like seabag Montefiore is caught at the red tzar, but to be fair a lot of that is probably supposition. There is definitely no supposition in this book. Paragraph he is very clear when he cannot confirm a source or story.Being somebody who is quite happy to read 1000 pages, I was a bit surprised at the relatively short length of this book. I thought there is no way he would be able to cover everything. But he does. I will go back to Roberts services biography of stalin for much more detail, but if anybody wants to start with an introductory biography which will probably give you the general reader everything you will ever need then go to this book. Really important contribution to the list of stalin biographies. Excellent.

There is a lot written about Stalin, one of the top three dictators of the twentieth century when it comes to brutality and power. I have not read other biographies about Stalin for several decades so I can not compare with other recent works but this one is a very well done study.The Book has a somewhat odd storyline with the main chapters in chronological order and a separate line based on his death and certain aspects of his life. Initially I found it to be somewhat strange but after a while I found it to be working well. It was better to read about the private Stalin and his families in a concentrated chapter than reading bits and pieces here and there.Having read a lot of history about the Soviet Union and Russia I know there are parts that are at times very boring and hard to get through (like the inner workings of the Communist Party) but Oleg Khlevniuk manages to balance this in a good way so the flow of the reading does not slow done.It is impressive that he manages to present Stalin in just 330 pages. It could easily have been more than twice as much but that would probably have left the book to a few specialists to enjoy. As written it is a very well balanced account.This book tells us about who he was, what he did and as far as can be certain, why he did it. It is also a warning for todays citizens of Russia not to let it happen again.The only thing that I missed in the book was an appendix listing the various people in the text and identifying them better. As it is there are a lot of important people in the book that are often presented with just their names. The truly horrible Beira is just one of the members of Stalins inner circle but who was he and why did Stalin not react to his crimes?But this was a very well done study and since I will be visiting the Stalin Museum in Gori Georgia in a few weeks it was a perfect introduction.

an excellent biography of this evil man: the translation is seemless.one of the best biographs I have read. actually entertaiing

Cover was blurry and it’s was not a biography about Stalin but a biography about his politics

Valeu a pena adquirir o livro. A biografia suportada por documentos até pouco tempo indisponíveis, oferece uma visão mais realista e menos panfletária da ditadura stalinista. Um paranóico a serviço da "ditadura do proletariado" que quase extinguiu os camponeses da Rússia