STALIN

A comprehensive, deeply researched study of one of the world’s most brutal dictators as he took the paths that would lead him to power.

Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was a frail boy who willed himself to improvement, physical and mental, with a program that Theodore Roosevelt would have recognized. He was remarkable, writes history professor Suny, but “at the same time quite ordinary, a small man placed in extraordinary circumstances.” Throughout his life, though, Stalin made efforts to excel at all he did, whether singing in a choir or writing poetry. “He was not above correcting his teachers,” Suny notes in his long but well-paced narrative. Without dipping too deeply into psychobiography, the author examines aspects of his home life that might have influenced his emergent defensiveness, and later paranoia, including a violent-tempered, alcoholic father and a mother who, though steely, encouraged her son to excel. Stalin left home for school in a larger city, moved into revolutionary circles that soon took him farther afield, and steadily rose in the ranks of Russian Marxists. Along the way, he used what Suny gently calls “dubious means” to consolidate his power as he aligned ever more closely with Lenin, who was in exile during much of the time that Stalin organized revolutionary activities in Moscow and Petrograd. Stalin was in exile, too, but almost immediately escaped from the remote Siberian town where he was sent. He helped engineer the Bolshevik victory over the post-czarist government and their Menshevik rivals. As Suny writes, “it was the more extreme picture sketched by the Bolsheviks—of the whole of propertied society, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries alike, as the enemy of the working class—that brought people out of the factories into the streets.” In all that effort—and in his clashes with fellow revolutionaries, notably Leon Trotsky—lay the seed for his later dictatorship.

A portrait of the totalitarian as a young artist, of great interest to any student of modern history.