Items in order will be sent as soon as they arrive in the warehouse. leaves the reader longing for the story still to come.' Jennifer Siegel, The New York Times one of the tragedies of Kotkin's book is its eerie and troubling relevance today.' George Walden, The Times 'Original, engaging, with a sharp, irreverent wit.' Sheila Fitzpatrick, Guardian 'Gripping. Kotkin's Stalin is more truthful and perceptive than that of others. It will surely become the standard work.' Robert Gellately, Times Higher Education 'This magnificent biography debunks many of the myths around Stalin.' John Thornhill, Financial Times 'A fine book. there is no study to rival Stephen Kotkin's.
Stalin emerges from Kotkin's book as that most frightening of figures - a man of absolute conviction.' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman 'A brilliant portrait. 'Exhilarating, compelling, terrifying and utterly gripping. Where did such great, monstrous power come from? The first of three volumes, the product of a decade of intrepid research, this landmark book offers the most convincing explanation yet of Stalin's power. Millions would die, and many more would suffer. He was about to begin uprooting and collectivization of agriculture and industry across the entire Soviet Union. There are several lengthy digressions, which often show Kotkin at his best.In January 1928 Stalin, the ruler of the largest country in the world, boarded a train bound for Siberia where he would embark upon the greatest gamble of his political life. In this volume, unlike the last, Stalin is ever-present and every known detail, from his most trivial interactions with Soviet citizens to his showdowns with most of the surviving Leninists, is dealt with. Mostly, however, the size of this second volume of his biography of Stalin, as with the first instalment, is due to Kotkin’s one-stop-shop approach, surveying and summarising all world history in the course of his narrative.
In the last fifteen years, Russian archives have become harder to access and have acquired relatively little that is new, so the size of this volume is only partly due to new research: Kotkin has looked at fifty-five microfilms of declassified documents first used by Dmitri Volkogonov over twenty years ago but neglected by subsequent researchers for material on Stalin’s relationship with the armed forces and security services he has diligently used peripheral sources overlooked by others, such as OGPU records for Khabarovsk in Russia’s far east. In the thousand or so pages Stephen Kotkin devotes to the central period of Stalin’s career, when he destroyed Soviet society and then tried to resurrect it in his own image, when he rid himself of enemies, real or imaginary, and prepared (or failed to prepare) for an apocalyptic war, the reader will find everything that is covered in two to three hundred pages in most of the recent biographies of Stalin by Russian, British and American scholars.
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