best biography about stalin

Top Ten Booklist on Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was one of bloodiest dictators in world history and one of the most significant people of the 20th Century. He was the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc of Eastern Europe. He killed millions of his own citizens and was its wartime leader during World War II. Despite his atrocities, Great Britain and the United States were compelled to work with Stalin against Germany.

Stephen Kotkin . Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (New York, Penguin, 2018)

Tim Tzouliadis . The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (Penguin, 2006)

During the Great Depression, Americans attracted to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, many of them met tragic fates. Tzouliadis shows how their dreams met with a harsh reality in the Soviet Union during Stalin's Red Terror.

Anne Applebaum . Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine . (Doubleday, 2018)]]

In Red Famine , Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million Ukrainians died in the 1930s not because they were accidental victims of bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.

This book provides a wide-ranging overview of Stalin. It is not a comprehensive as other books on this list, but it is a fantastic place to start.

Simon Sebag Montefiore . Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar . (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)

James Harris . The Great Fear: Stalin's Reign of Terror in the 1930s , (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017)

Between the winter of 1936 and the autumn of 1938, approximately three-quarters of a million Soviet citizens were subject to summary execution. More than a million others were sentenced to lengthy terms in labor camps. Commonly known as 'Stalin's Great Terror', it is also among the most misunderstood moments in the history of the twentieth century.

While Stalin has often been dismissed as paranoid and irrational, Stalin's behavior followed a clear political logic, contend Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk. Stalin's consistent and overriding goal after the war was to consolidate the Soviet Union's status as a superpower and, in the face of growing decrepitude, to maintain his own hold as leader of that power.

Sheila Fitzpatrick . Everyday Stalinism : Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000)

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by a leading authority on modern Russian history. Focusing on the urban population, Fitzpatrick depicts a world of privation, overcrowding, endless lines, and broken homes, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollowly.

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for more than two decades, instituting a reign of death and terror while modernizing Russia and helping to defeat Nazism.

(1878-1953)

Who Was Joseph Stalin?

Joseph Stalin rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party in Russia, becoming a Soviet dictator after the death of Vladimir Lenin . Stalin forced rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agricultural land, resulting in millions dying from famine while others were sent to labor camps. His Red Army helped defeat Nazi Germany during World War II .

On December 18, 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili - later known as Joseph Stalin - was born.

The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a washerwoman, Stalin was a frail child. At age 7, he contracted smallpox, leaving his face scarred.

A few years later he was injured in a carriage accident which left arm slightly deformed (some accounts state his arm trouble was a result of blood poisoning from the injury).

The other village children treated him cruelly, instilling in him a sense of inferiority. Because of this, Stalin began a quest for greatness and respect. He also developed a cruel streak for those who crossed him.

Stalin's mother, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian , wanted him to become a priest. In 1888, she managed to enroll him in church school in Gori. Stalin did well in school, and his efforts gained him a scholarship to Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894.

A year later, Stalin came in contact with Messame Dassy, a secret organization that supported Georgian independence from Russia. Some of the members were socialists who introduced him to the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Stalin joined the group in 1898.

Though he excelled in seminary school, Stalin left in 1899. Accounts differ as to the reason; official school records state he was unable to pay the tuition and withdrew. It's also speculated he was asked to leave due to his political views challenging the tsarist regime of Nicholas II .

Stalin chose not to return home, but stayed in Tiflis, devoting his time to the revolutionary movement. For a time, he found work as a tutor and later as a clerk at the Tiflis Observatory. In 1901, he joined the Social Democratic Labor Party and worked full-time for the revolutionary movement.

Russian Revolution

In 1902, he was arrested for coordinating a labor strike and exiled to Siberia, the first of his many arrests and exiles in the fledgling years of the Russian Revolution . It was during this time that he adopted the name Stalin, meaning "steel" in Russian.

Though never a strong orator like Vladimir Lenin or an intellectual like Leon Trotsky , Stalin excelled in the mundane operations of the revolution, calling meetings, publishing leaflets and organizing strikes and demonstrations.

After escaping from exile, he was marked by the Okhranka, (the tsar's secret police) as an outlaw and continued his work in hiding, raising money through robberies, kidnappings and extortion. Stalin gained infamy being associated with the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, which resulted in several deaths and 250,000 rubles stolen (approximately $3.4 million in U.S. dollars).

In February 1917, the Russian Revolution began. By March, the tsar had abdicated the throne and was placed under house arrest. For a time, the revolutionaries supported a provisional government, believing a smooth transition of power was possible.

But in April 1917, Bolshevik leader Lenin denounced the provisional government, arguing that the people should rise up and take control by seizing land from the rich and factories from the industrialists. By October, the revolution was complete and the Bolsheviks were in control.

Communist Party Leader

The fledgling Soviet government went through a violent period after the revolution as various individuals vied for position and control.

In 1922, Stalin was appointed to the newly created office of general secretary of the Communist Party. Though not a significant post at the time, it gave Stalin control over all party member appointments, which allowed him to build his base.

He made shrewd appointments and consolidated his power so that eventually nearly all members of the central command owed their position to him. By the time anyone realized what he had done, it was too late. Even Lenin, who was gravely ill, was helpless to regain control from Stalin.

Great Purge

After Lenin's death, in 1924, Stalin set out to destroy the old party leadership and take total control. At first, he had people removed from power through bureaucratic shuffling and denunciations.

Many were exiled abroad to Europe and the Americas, including presumed Lenin successor Leon Trotsky. However, further paranoia set in and Stalin soon conducted a vast reign of terror, having people arrested in the night and put before spectacular show trials.

Potential rivals were accused of aligning with capitalist nations, convicted of being "enemies of the people" and summarily executed. The period known as the Great Purge eventually extended beyond the party elite to local officials suspected of counter-revolutionary activities.

Reform and Famine

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin reversed the Bolshevik agrarian policy by seizing land given earlier to the peasants and organizing collective farms. This essentially reduced the peasants back to serfs, as they had been during the monarchy.

Stalin believed that collectivism would accelerate food production, but the peasants resented losing their land and working for the state. Millions were killed in forced labor or starved during the ensuing famine.

Stalin also set in motion rapid industrialization that initially achieved huge successes, but over time cost millions of lives and vast damage to the environment. Any resistance was met with swift and lethal response; millions of people were exiled to the labor camps of the Gulag or were executed.

World War II

As war clouds gathered over Europe in 1939, Stalin made a seemingly brilliant move, signing a nonaggression pact with Germany's Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

Stalin was convinced of Hitler's integrity and ignored warnings from his military commanders that Germany was mobilizing armies on its eastern front. When the Nazi blitzkrieg struck in June 1941, the Soviet Army was completely unprepared and immediately suffered massive losses.

Stalin was so distraught at Hitler's treachery that he hid in his office for several days. By the time Stalin regained his resolve, German armies occupied all of the Ukraine and Belarus, and its artillery surrounded Leningrad.

To make matters worse, the purges of the 1930s had depleted the Soviet Army and government leadership to the point where both were nearly dysfunctional. After heroic efforts on the part of the Soviet Army and the Russian people, the Germans were turned back at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943.

By the next year, the Soviet Army was liberating countries in Eastern Europe, even before the Allies had mounted a serious challenge against Hitler at D-Day .

Stalin and the West

Stalin had been suspicious of the West since the inception of the Soviet Union , and once the Soviet Union had entered the war, Stalin had demanded the Allies open up a second front against Germany.

Both British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that such an action would result in heavy casualties. This only deepened Stalin's suspicion of the West, as millions of Russians died.

As the tide of war slowly turned in the Allies' favor, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin to discuss postwar arrangements. At the first of these meetings, in Tehran, Iran, in late 1943, the recent victory in Stalingrad put Stalin in a solid bargaining position. He demanded the Allies open a second front against Germany, which they agreed to in the spring of 1944.

In February 1945, the three leaders met again at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea. With Soviet troops liberating countries in Eastern Europe, Stalin was again in a strong position and negotiated virtually a free hand in reorganizing their governments. He also agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated.

The situation changed at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Roosevelt died that April and was replaced by President Harry S. Truman . British parliamentary elections had replaced Prime Minister Churchill with Clement Attlee as Britain's chief negotiator.

By now, the British and Americans were suspicious of Stalin's intentions and wanted to avoid Soviet involvement in a postwar Japan. The dropping of two atomic bombs in August 1945 forced Japan's surrender before the Soviets could mobilize.

Stalin and Foreign Relations

Convinced of the Allies' hostility toward the Soviet Union, Stalin became obsessed with the threat of an invasion from the West. Between 1945 and 1948, he established Communist regimes in many Eastern European countries, creating a vast buffer zone between Western Europe and "Mother Russia."

Western powers interpreted these actions as proof of Stalin's desire to place Europe under Communist control, thus formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to counter Soviet influence.

In 1948, Stalin ordered an economic blockade on the German city of Berlin, in hopes of gaining full control of the city. The Allies responded with the massive Berlin Airlift , supplying the city and eventually forcing Stalin to back down.

Stalin suffered another foreign policy defeat after he encouraged North Korean Communist leader Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea, believing the United States would not interfere.

Earlier, he had ordered the Soviet representative to the United Nations to boycott the Security Council because it refused to accept the newly formed Communist People's Republic of China into the United Nations. When the resolution to support South Korea came to a vote in the Security Council, the Soviet Union was unable to use its veto.

How Many People Did Joseph Stalin Kill?

It's estimated that Stalin killed as many as 20 million people, directly or indirectly, through famine, forced labor camps, collectivization and executions.

Some scholars have argued that Stalin's record of killings amount to genocide and make him one of history's most ruthless mass murderers.

Though his popularity from his successes during World War II was strong, Stalin's health began to deteriorate in the early 1950s. After an assassination plot was uncovered, he ordered the head of the secret police to instigate a new purge of the Communist Party.

Before it could be executed, however, Stalin died on March 5, 1953. He left a legacy of death and horror, even as he turned a backward Russia into a world superpower.

Stalin was eventually denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev , in 1956. However, he has found a rekindled popularity among many of Russia's young people.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Joseph Stalin
• Birth Year: 1878
• Birth date: December 18, 1878
• Birth City: Gori, Georgia
• Birth Country: Russia
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for more than two decades, instituting a reign of death and terror while modernizing Russia and helping to defeat Nazism.
• War and Militaries
• World Politics
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Tiflis Theological Seminary
• Church school (Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire)
• Death Year: 1953
• Death date: March 5, 1953
• Death City: Moscow
• Death Country: Russia

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Joseph Stalin Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/joseph-stalin
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 4, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• History shows that there are no invincible armies.
• I believe in one thing only, the power of human will.
• It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
• In the Soviet army, it takes more courage to retreat than advance.

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Joseph Stalin

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 7, 2024 | Original: November 12, 2009

Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower. However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own citizens died during his brutal reign. Stalin became involved in revolutionary politics, as well as criminal activities, as a young man. After Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin died, Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals for control of the party. Stalin aligned with the United States and Britain in World War II but afterward engaged in an increasingly tense relationship with the West known as the Cold War . After his death, the Soviets initiated a de-Stalinization process.

Young Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 18, 1878, or December 6, 1878, according to the Old Style Julian calendar (although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, 1879). He grew up in the small town of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire. When he was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin, from the Russian for “man of steel.”

Did you know? In 1925, the Russian city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad. In 1961, as part of the de-Stalinization process, the city, located along Europe's longest river, the Volga, became known as Volgograd. Today, it is one of Russia's largest cities and a key industrial center.

Stalin grew up poor and an only child. His father was a shoemaker and an alcoholic who beat his son, and his mother was a laundress. As a boy, Stalin contracted smallpox , which left him with lifelong facial scars. As a teen, he earned a scholarship to attend a seminary in the nearby city of Tblisi and study for the priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church.

While there he began secretly reading the work of German social philosopher and Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx , becoming interested in the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1899, Stalin was expelled from the seminary for missing exams, although he claimed it was for Marxist propaganda.

After leaving school, Stalin became an underground political agitator, taking part in labor demonstrations and strikes. He adopted the name Koba, after a fictional Georgian outlaw-hero, and joined the more militant wing of the Marxist Social Democratic movement, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin.

Stalin also became involved in various criminal activities, including bank heists, the proceeds from which were used to help fund the Bolshevik Party. He was arrested multiple times between 1902 and 1913, and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia.

In 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze, a seamstress. The couple had one son, Yakov, who died as a prisoner in Germany during World War II. Ekaterina perished from typhus when her son was an infant.

In 1918 (some sources cite 1919), Stalin married his second wife, Nadezhda “Nadya” Alliluyeva, the daughter of a Russian revolutionary. They had two children, a boy and a girl (Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva , caused an international scandal when she defected to the United States in 1967). Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s. Stalin also fathered several children out of wedlock.

Lenin vs Stalin: Their Showdown Over the Birth of the USSR

Even after suffering a stroke, Lenin fought Stalin from the isolation of his bed. Especially after Stalin insulted his wife.

How the KGB Silenced Dissent During the Soviet Era

From the Bolsheviks' Red Terror and Stalin's Great Purge to forced hospital 'treatments,' the secret police agency—and its earlier incarnations—used consistently brutal tactics.

Why Stalin Tried to Stamp Out Religion in the Soviet Union

Joseph Stalin led a uniquely brutal campaign against religion and religious leaders.

Rise to Power

In 1912, Lenin, who was then in exile in Switzerland, appointed Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian Revolution . The Soviet Union was founded in 1922, with Lenin as its first leader.

During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in 1922 he became secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party , a role that enabled him to appoint his allies to government jobs and grow a base of political support.

After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the Communist Party. By the late 1920s, he had become dictator of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union Under Stalin

Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial superpower. His development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms.

Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin’s orders and were shot or exiled as punishment, particularly the kulaks, the more-prosperous farmers who owned land and hired paid workers. The forced collectivization soon led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions.

Stalin ruled by terror, with a totalitarian grip in order to eliminate anyone who might oppose him. He expanded the powers of the secret police, encouraged citizens to spy on one another and had millions of people killed or sent to the Gulag system of forced labor camps.

During the second half of the 1930s, Stalin instituted the Great Purge , a series of campaigns designed to rid the Communist Party, the military and other parts of Soviet society from those he considered a threat.

Additionally, Stalin built a cult of personality around himself in the Soviet Union. Cities were renamed in his honor. Soviet history books were rewritten to give him a more prominent role in the revolution and mythologize other aspects of his life.

Stalin was the subject of flattering artwork, literature and music, and his name became part of the Soviet national anthem. He censored photographs in an attempt to rewrite history, removing former associates executed during his many purges. His government also controlled the Soviet media.

How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine

Cruel efforts under Stalin to impose collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million dead.

Soviet Union Leaders: A Timeline

From Stalin's reign of terror to Gorbachev and glasnost, meet the eight leaders who presided over the USSR.

How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin’s Great Purge

Stalin didn’t have Photoshop—but that didn’t keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Even the famous photo of Soviet soldiers raising their flag after the Battle of Berlin was altered.

Joseph Stalin and World War II

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Joseph Stalin and Germany’s Nazi Party dictator Adolf Hitler signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact . Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He also launched an invasion of Finland.

Then, in June 1941, Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded the USSR, making significant early inroads. (Stalin had ignored warnings from the Americans and the British, as well as his own intelligence agents, about a potential invasion, and the Soviets were not prepared for war.)

As German troops approached the Soviet capital of Moscow, Stalin remained there and directed a scorched earth defensive policy, destroying any supplies or infrastructure that might benefit the enemy. The tide turned for the Soviets with the Battle of Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943, during which the Red Army defeated the Germans and eventually drove them from Russia.

As the war progressed, Stalin participated in the major Allied conferences, including the Tehran Conference (1943) and the Yalta Conference (1945). His iron will and deft political skills enabled him to play the loyal ally while never abandoning his vision of an expanded postwar Soviet empire.

Later Years

Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He initiated a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign–especially Western–influence.

He established communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and in 1949 led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb . In 1950, he gave North Korea’s communist leader Kim Il Sung permission to invade United States-supported South Korea , an event that triggered the Korean War .

How a Secret Hitler‑Stalin Pact Set the Stage for WWII

The Nazis and Soviets were mortal enemies. Why did they sign a nonaggression pact—and why didn't it last?

FDR, Churchill and Stalin: Inside Their Uneasy WWII Alliance

To defeat Hitler, the 'Big Three' entered into a tense three‑way shotgun marriage.

Why Did Stalin Support the Start of the Korean War?

Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 with the approval of Joseph Stalin and the promise of backing from China.

How Did Joseph Stalin Die?

Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, died on March 5, 1953, at age 74, after suffering a stroke. His body was embalmed and preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until 1961, when it was removed and buried near the Kremlin walls as part of the de-Stalinization process initiated by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971).

How Many People Did Joseph Stalin Kill?

By some estimates, Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 6 million to 20 million people during his brutal rule, either though political executions or indirectly as a result of Stalin’s policies. The killings first began in the 1930s, as a wave of executions swept the Soviet Union during Stalin’s Great Purge.

“In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested,” said Stanford University history professor Norman Naimark in a 2010 interview. “Some officials overfulfilled as a way of showing their exuberance.”

Millions more were killed in the horrific famine that struck Ukraine in 1932-1933 and the Kazakh region from 1930 to 1933, as a of Stalin's cruel efforts to impose collectivism of agriculture and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism. Estimates vary, but about 4 million men, women and children are believed to have starved to death during the Holodomor (a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”).

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). PBS . Joseph Stalin: National hero or cold-blooded murderer? BBC . Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide? Stanford News . 

HISTORY Vault: Hitler and Stalin: Roots of Evil

An examination of the paranoia, cold-bloodedness, and sadism of two of the 20th century's most brutal dictators and mass murderers: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

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How Stalin Became Stalinist

Is there any point to another Stalin biography? Before the opening of the old Soviet archives, three decades ago, the best historians mastered the limited available sources and proceeded to fill in the gaps through inspired guesswork. In addition to genuine insight, this guesswork sometimes involved cross-Atlantic psychoanalysis, including speculations on how Stalin was swaddled as an infant, and could reach the point of imagining his thoughts and putting them in quotation marks.

But the archives—while curbing these excesses, settling old arguments over the precise number of people shot by Stalin’s secret police during the Terror (an astonishing six hundred and eighty-one thousand six hundred and ninety-two), and showing definitively that it was Stalin who signed the execution orders—have not radically altered anyone’s over-all conception of what sort of person Stalin was, or what sort of regime he presided over. The Bolsheviks, we’ve learned, sounded behind closed doors exactly the way they sounded in public. They were what we thought they were.

In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls—the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book “ Everyday Stalinism ,” called “ordinary life in extraordinary times.” With a slight lowering of the ideological temperature, there has been far more willingness to see in the Soviet experiment not just horror and death but good intentions, contradictions, and commonalities with Western modernity. The appearance or reappearance on the map of the post-Soviet republics—in part, as scholars have pointed out, because of the “indigenization” policy instituted by Lenin and Stalin—has also prompted a lot of productive work on the experiences of the Soviet periphery.

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin’s “ Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization ” (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.’s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties. The book was a sharp-elbowed intervention in the decades-old debate between “totalitarian” historians, who saw in the Soviet Union an omnipotent state imposing its will on a defenseless populace, and “revisionist” historians, who saw a more dynamic and fluid society, with some portion of the population actually supporting the regime. Kotkin’s synthesis was influenced by the philosopher Michel Foucault, who spent several semesters at Berkeley, where Kotkin was a graduate student. Foucault had argued that power did not reside exclusively or even primarily with the state but was disseminated like a web over a society’s institutions. This insight, applied to the Stalinist era, was transformative. Yes, the regime tried to impose its will and its ideas on the population, as the totalitarians had claimed; but also, as the revisionists had counter-claimed, the population was an active participant in and interpreter of this project. With its attention to everyday life, “Magnetic Mountain” was revisionist in form; with its emphasis on ideology (Kotkin’s other influence was Martin Malia, the intellectual historian and ardent cold warrior), it was totalitarian in content. The key theoretical concept was “speaking Bolshevik,” by which Kotkin meant not only the rote language people used to navigate the bureaucracy but also the more evocative language—of “shock work,” “capitalist encirclement,” and, above all, “building socialism”—that people increasingly used to understand themselves and their lives.

Two decades later, Kotkin has seemingly reversed field and produced . . . a Stalin biography . Entering a crowded marketplace, the book makes its mark through its theoretical sophistication, relentless argumentation, and sheer Stakhanovite immensity: two volumes and two thousand closely printed pages in, we’re only up to 1941. (A projected third volume should take us through the war and to Stalin’s death, in 1953.) Kotkin also attempts to answer the chief philosophical question about Stalin: whether the monstrous regime he created was a function of his personality or of something inherent in Bolshevism.

Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph’s mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old. This was a financial blow to the family, but Keke learned how to make dresses and managed to keep Joseph, her only child, in the classroom. He studied first at the local theological school, then at the illustrious theological seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi).

Historians have long wondered whether the eventual mass murderer could be discerned in the Tiflis seminarian. The answer appears to be no. Joseph’s childhood was pretty ordinary for that time and place. His father beat him, but that was standard; he was poor, but relatives and neighbors helped out; he was an outstanding student, and a leader at his school, but he did not stage show trials of any of his classmates. (On swaddling, the jury is still out.)

Young Joseph grew restless at the seminary and was expelled after a series of minor infractions, including the discovery in his possession of a large cache of anti-monarchical literature. He had decided to become a revolutionary, not a priest, but he remained, for the rest of his life, a voracious and attentive reader. He rose through the ranks of the Georgian revolutionary movement, impressing Lenin, then in European exile, with his strident articles and his intrigues against rival socialist factions. As a rebellious youth at the seminary, he had adopted a nickname, Koba, after an outlaw character from a popular nineteenth-century Georgian novel, and he was an effective sometime organizer of the “expropriations”—often of bank wagons transporting cash—with which the revolutionary movement tried to finance itself. The British journalist and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, in his vivid “ Young Stalin ,” depicted him as a “gangster godfather” and “prolific lover.”

Kotkin has no patience for this sort of thing. “Stalin had a penis, and he used it” is about the extent of his commentary on Stalin’s romantic exploits, and neither does he have any interest in Stalin as a gangster godfather. Stalin’s primary contribution to the movement, Kotkin maintains, was through his organizing work and his pen—it was to sign an article he wrote on socialism and nationalism that he came up with “Stalin,” after the Russian word for “steel.” Young Stalin developed a clear, catechistic style, and was adept at boiling down complex ideas into simple binaries and folksy fables. That he was a little rougher around the edges than some of the bespectacled Jewish intellectuals who filled the ranks of the early Russian socialist movement was more a testament to the fact that they were bespectacled Jewish intellectuals than that Stalin was particularly thuggish. Perhaps the most telling detail found in the archives about the young Stalin comes from a tsarist secret-police characterization that has him behaving “in a highly cautious manner, always looking over his shoulder as he walks.” He was careful, well organized, and totally committed. His various activities landed him in prison several times and finally earned him, in 1913, a sentence to Siberian exile, where he remained until the fall of the tsarist autocracy, in February, 1917.

The sudden collapse of the monarchy that had ruled Russia for three hundred years led to chaos. Russia immediately became, as one participant put it, “the freest country in the world.” The political prisoners were free; the Pale of Settlement was obliterated; and the independence-minded peoples on the Russian periphery—including the Poles, the Balts, the Georgians, and the Ukrainians—were no longer captive. As the great literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, then serving in the Russian Army in Persia, put it, “The show ‘Russia’ was over; everyone was hurrying to get his hat and coat.” Unfortunately, nobody had called off the First World War, and Russia was still fighting the Central Powers. The post-February governments—shifting coalitions of liberal gentry and socialist reformers—decided, fatefully, to stay the course.

Confusion reigned among the many revolutionaries returning to St. Petersburg (then Petrograd), including Stalin. With the help of a mild-mannered Bolshevik named Lev Kamenev, Stalin quickly wrested control of the Party mouthpiece, Pravda , from the younger, less experienced Vyacheslav Molotov, and proceeded to advance a moderate agenda: to remain in the war and even to seek rapprochement with the other socialist parties. Lenin, then in Switzerland, began bombarding Stalin with instructions to take a tougher line: no war and no socialist coalition. Stalin, thinking Lenin out of touch, ignored him. It wasn’t until April that Lenin, having negotiated with the Germans to provide him safe passage back to Russia (the Germans realized that he might have a destabilizing effect on their enemy), arrived at the Finland Station, in St. Petersburg, and announced his radical opposition to the current government and to the war. Six months later, in October, Bolshevik workers, soldiers, and sailors seized the central telegraph and the bridges, arrested the government, and declared Soviet power. For the next four years, they waged a civil war against all their enemies, including the newly independent states to the south and west.

Kotkin’s first volume, “ Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 ,” published three years ago, situated the Soviet experiment amid the broad sweep of European history. The revolution was a Russian phenomenon, yes; but it was also a response to the forms of mass politics and total war that shook Europe in the first two decades of the twentieth century. By reducing the Russian Empire to near-starvation, the First World War created the opportunity for the Bolsheviks to seize power. But Kotkin makes clear that the war’s slaughter fields also confirmed the Bolshevik view that the capitalist-imperialist system was plunging the world into suicide—and lowered the price, in everyone’s eyes, of human life.

The other notable aspect of the international situation was what came to be called “capitalist encirclement.” After the Bolsheviks took power and pulled out of the war, Russia’s former allies joined the civil war on the side of the anti-Bolshevik Whites. British forces landed in the north; British and French forces landed in the south; a Czech battalion, trying to return home via the Trans-Siberian Railway, ended up conquering a swath of western Siberia. None of these forces fought very hard, and by 1920 they were mostly gone. But their intervention convinced the Bolsheviks that the capitalist powers would not rest until Communism was dead. After the civil war, Stalin watched with trepidation as European governments were overthrown by small groups of determined plotters. In Italy, in 1922, Mussolini was made Prime Minister after merely threatening to march on Rome. In Poland, a few years later, Józef Piłsudski took Warsaw. Romania, Hungary, the Baltic states—all fell under the sway of right-wing dictatorships, and all were deeply hostile to Soviet power.

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A key argument in “Paradoxes of Power” revolved around Stalin’s relationship to Lenin. Stalin played an important but secondary role in the October Revolution; the starring roles were unquestionably Lenin’s and Trotsky’s. Lenin was a brilliant, once-in-a-generation strategist, tacking right when others tacked left, attacking when they retreated, always keeping his end goal in view. Trotsky was a magnificent orator, one of the best propagandistic writers of the twentieth century, and completely fearless. He led the Petrograd Soviet—the representative body for the workers and soldiers of the empire’s capital—in the crucial months before the revolution, and then built from scratch the Red Army that won the civil war. Kotkin argues that a leftist revolution of one kind or another was likely to take place in Russia in 1917, but there did not have to be two of them, and the second did not have to be of the radical Communist variety. “The Bolshevik putsch could have been prevented by a pair of bullets,” Kotkin writes: one each for Lenin and Trotsky. None for Stalin. And this is Stalin’s biographer!

Still, when it came time to build a mass party that could administer a powerful state, Lenin found himself depending more and more on Stalin. It turned out that Stalin had a genius for management—for setting up clear lines of authority and for inspiring and organizing people. Anyone who’s ever spent any time around leftist revolutionaries, or just members of a fractious community garden, will recognize how valuable such skills might be. In 1922, Lenin created a new post expressly for Stalin: General Secretary of the Communist Party.

But doubts about their relationship would haunt Stalin throughout his rule. His critics, led by Trotsky, never tired of reminding him of his secondary role in the Bolshevik Revolution. They also never let him forget a document that Lenin drafted in late 1922 and early 1923, shortly before he became incapacitated by his third stroke, in which he urged that Stalin be removed from his post. “Comrade Stalin,” Lenin wrote, or dictated, “having become General-Secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.” In an addendum to the letter, apparently after an incident in which Stalin chewed out Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin was more categorical: “Stalin is too rude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General-Secretary.” Lenin hoped his letter would be read aloud at the next Party Congress. Instead, it was read in small group sessions, where it could be more easily controlled, and not published in the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death.

Here again the opinionated Kotkin enters the arena. The testament is a key document not only because of its dramatic nature—Lenin, on his deathbed, rejecting Stalin—but because it seems to address one of the central questions about the revolution: Did it lead inexorably to Stalin? If the answer is yes, that tells you all you need to know about this revolution. If the answer is no—if there were other, more humane and democratic paths for the revolution to take—then the whole question requires more thought.

Kotkin’s answer is twofold. The first is to allege that the testament was a forgery cooked up by Krupskaya. Kotkin believes that Lenin was too incapacitated to have composed the document in any legitimate way. Krupskaya must have interpreted it, as one would a Ouija board. This was the one claim in the first volume that really rankled other historians. Some of them pointed out that the recent Russian originator of the testament-forgery thesis, on whose work Kotkin relied, was an unapologetic Stalinist. For a historian who prizes evidence as much as Kotkin does, it seemed an unnecessarily extravagant claim. The pugnacious Kotkin has not backed down, however; in Volume II, the testament appears again as “Lenin’s supposed testament.”

But Kotkin has a second and more convincing answer to the question of the succession: Stalin was, quite simply, the man most qualified for the job. Trotsky claimed that Stalin was adept at manipulating the bureaucracy, and meant this as an insult. In fact, these were the skills necessary to govern a modern state, and they explain why Stalin had already won so much power while Lenin still lived. Trotsky did not have the talent for the dull work of administration. Even in exile, he was constantly undermining his allies and arguing with his friends. In Kotkin’s unsentimental appraisal, Trotsky was “just not the leader people thought he was, or that Stalin turned out to be.”

So much for Trotsky. But might things still have turned out differently? The second half of Kotkin’s first volume describes the struggle for succession after Lenin’s death, in 1924. It was deeply intimate: the men Stalin would eventually murder had known him for years, going back to the revolutionary underground. Inside the politburo, at the very top of the Communist hierarchy, the old revolutionaries had arguments that were both heated and personal. At one meeting, Trotsky stood up and accused Stalin of being the “grave digger of the revolution.” Stalin grew red in the face and left, slamming the door. At another meeting, it was Trotsky’s turn to storm out and slam the door, though in this case, Kotkin writes, the door was “a massive metal structure not given to demonstrative slamming. He could only manage to bring it to a close slowly, unwittingly demonstrating his impotence.”

A distinguished previous biographer , Robert C. Tucker, once confessed to fantasizing that one of Stalin’s comrades would assassinate the Great Leader: “Sometimes in the quiet of my study I have found myself bursting out to their ghosts: ‘For God’s sake, stab him with a knife, or pick up a heavy object and bash his brains out, the lives you save may include your own!’ ” In the nineteen-twenties, assassination wouldn’t have been necessary; a concerted effort by Stalin’s opponents, especially with Lenin’s testament in their pockets, could easily have unseated him. They were too timid to do it, but also, Kotkin concludes, they just didn’t realize what Stalin would become. They had had some intimations: they knew he could be rude, and they even knew he could be psychologically cruel. During his Siberian exile, he had briefly lived with Yakov (Yashka) Sverdlov, a fellow-Bolshevik and later the titular head of the Soviet government, but the two broke up house because Stalin refused to do the dishes and also because he had acquired a dog and started calling him Yashka. “Of course for Sverdlov that wasn’t pleasant,” Stalin later admitted. “He was Yashka and the dog was Yashka.” More significant was Stalin’s activity during the civil war. When he went to the city of Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad), on the Southern Front, to try to turn the tide for the Bolsheviks, he immediately caused a mess by fighting with the tsarist-era officers who were saving the Red Army from defeat, and then pursuing (and executing) supposed enemies of the people.

And yet Stalin’s fellow-Bolsheviks couldn’t see whom they were dealing with. During the period of collective leadership that followed Lenin’s death, one group allied with Stalin to oust Trotsky; the next allied with Stalin to oust the first group. And so on. There could indeed have been another path for the Bolshevik Revolution: the very naïveté, idealism, and lack of guile demonstrated by so many of the Old Bolsheviks remains a testament to their decency. Kotkin proposes a series of interlocking arguments to explain the Stalinist outcome: the conspiratorial rigidity of Bolshevism; the state’s total domination of life in the absence of private property; the peculiar personality of Stalin; and the pressures of geopolitics. An attempt by very determined people to carry out radical change in a huge country was never going to be without bloodshed. And the worldwide financial crisis and the instability in Europe were going to make for a difficult decade, no matter what. But nothing foreordained the extent of the violence.

Kotkin’s first volume closed in 1928, with Stalin, having consolidated his power, making a rare trip to Siberia to launch what would become his war against the peasants. The second volume, “ Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 ,” opens in the same place. But something has happened in between. The Stalin of the first volume was reacting to external stimuli, in a more or less reasonable manner. The Stalin of the second volume has lost his mind, and is fully in control.

As Kotkin argued in the first volume, the October Revolution was actually two separate revolutions. One was the revolution in the cities, the storming of the Winter Palace, the fight for the Kremlin. The other, wider revolution took place in the countryside. There peasants who had for hundreds of years been subjugated and brutalized by the landed gentry rose up and chased them off their lands. They then reapportioned the land among themselves and got to work farming it. During the civil war, the Bolsheviks had staged periodic raids on the countryside to extract grain for the cities and the war effort—leading, eventually, to an immense famine in 1921 that killed millions—but, in the aftermath of the war, Lenin performed one of his patented strategic reversals and declared a New Economic Policy, or NEP , which partially legalized private enterprise and eased up considerably on the peasants. As a result, ten years after the October Revolution most of the land in the Soviet Union was in private hands.

For Stalin, this could not stand. In the arguments during the power struggles of the nineteen-twenties, he had used his support for the NEP to isolate its left-wing critics, notably Trotsky, but once he’d consolidated his power he became a critic, too. He believed that another European war was coming, and that, in order to survive it, backward Russia would have to industrialize. “We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries,” he declared in 1931. “We must make good this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.” Rapid industrialization would require that peasants deliver grain to the state on a set schedule; it would also require that many peasants become industrial workers. The U.S.S.R. needed large, mechanized farms, like those in the United States. And the independent, landowning peasantry was a threat. “Either we destroy the kulaks as a class,” Stalin said in 1929, using the term for rich or greedy (“fist-like”) peasants, “or the kulaks will grow as a class of capitalists and liquidate the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The tragedy of Stalin’s agricultural collectivization unfolded in stages. In the summer of 1929, more than twenty-five thousand “politically literate” young Bolsheviks fanned out from Moscow to the nation’s rural areas, charged with setting up the new collectives. In the villages, they encountered fierce resistance. Most peasants had no wish to give up their livestock and be herded to giant farms; they began, en masse, to slaughter their livestock and eat it. When Bolsheviks came to demand their grain, the peasants shot them—more than a thousand were killed in 1930 alone. In some ways, this resembled the back-to-the-people movement of the nineteenth century, in which young progressives had been sent to the countryside to be with “the people,” and the people had rejected them.

But this time the progressives returned with machine guns. The so-called kulaks were arrested and exiled, and sometimes shot. Their property was confiscated. Then the definition of “kulak” expanded. There were not two million well-off farmers in the impoverished U.S.S.R. in the late twenties. And yet that’s how many were arrested for being such. By the end of collectivization, five million people had been “dekulakized.”

The slaughter of livestock, the mass arrests, and the requisition of vast quantities of grain led, inevitably, to shortages. A cold spring and a dry summer in 1931 meant disaster. Local and regional bosses pleaded with Stalin to relax the grain-requisitioning quotas, but he was stinting about it; he believed that the peasants were holding out on him. Long after all the grain had been beaten and tortured from them, Stalin still thought that they had hidden reserves. People began to starve. When they tried to leave their villages and head for the cities, where the grain that had been taken from them was turned into bread, they were blocked by armed detachments; when they tried to break into the government silos where their requisitioned grain was kept, they were shot. Parents ate their children. Before it was over, between five and seven million people would die of starvation and disease. Nearly four million of those deaths were in Ukraine, where the famine was accompanied by arrests and executions of the nationalist intelligentsia; more than a million were in sparsely populated Kazakhstan, whose traditionally nomadic farmers were annihilated. Given the destruction in Kazakhstan, Kotkin rejects out of hand the argument that the famine was specifically Ukrainian. “The famine was Soviet,” he writes. But he does not underestimate the catastrophe. The huge loss of life, during peacetime, destabilized the country, and the Party. For the first time, there was serious criticism of Stalin in the Party ranks, and talk of removing him. By then, it was too late.

Kotkin’s Stalin is a workaholic. He is a tireless reader, not just of books but of the endless reports he receives from his ministries and deputies and, most of all, from his secret police. Kotkin compares him favorably with the hedonistic Mussolini and the late-sleeping Hitler. The Führer’s hands-off tyranny has led to a historians’ debate about his actual participation in the crimes of his regime, and to Ian Kershaw’s famous concept of “working towards the Führer”; that is, anticipating his wishes in the absence of direct orders. No such confusion can exist with Stalin. “One comes away flabbergasted,” Kotkin writes, “by the quantity of information he managed to command and the number of spheres in which he intervened.” Stalin adjusted the grain quotas during collectivization, or refused to; he read novels, attended plays, suggested changes to new films; and he edited the interrogation protocols of accused enemies of the people, adding, deleting, urging further lines of questioning as well as methods for getting answers (“Beat Unshlikht for not naming the Polish agents for each region”).

Meanwhile, as the Western world was gripped by the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was industrializing at a rapid pace. The five-year plans laying out the targets for the Soviet economy were full of exaggerations and fantasies, but the Soviets really did build a steel industry and an auto industry; they constructed canals and railroads; they mined nickel in the Arctic and gold in the Far East and coal in the Donbass. Some of this work was done by Gulag slave labor; the rest was done by poorly paid workers living in tents and makeshift dormitories. It was done with tremendous inefficiency and loss of life. But it was done. The Soviet Union started making trucks and tanks and airplanes. When the time came, these turned the tide of the war.

Kotkin walks us to the threshold of Stalin’s Terror slowly. It had no single cause; the causes were cumulative. There was the stress, throughout the nineteen-twenties, over Lenin’s testament. There was the calamity of collectivization and the opposition it engendered inside the Party. There was the suicide of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1932, and then the assassination of his close friend Sergei Kirov, the young Party boss of Leningrad, by a deranged former Communist, in 1934. There was the fact that Trotsky, exiled since 1929, remained a popular figure among the Spanish Communists fighting in that country’s civil war.

Most significant, from Stalin’s perspective, was that he really did have critics within the Party. He had critics because he was not Lenin. He had not almost single-handedly built a revolutionary party and then led it to power in the world’s largest country. And he made mistakes. He urged the Red Army to capture Lwów in 1920, contributing to the loss of Poland; he urged the Chinese Communists to ally with the Nationalists, resulting in thousands dead; most fatefully, he refused to allow European Communist parties to ally with social democrats—a decision that helped propel Adolf Hitler to power. As Kotkin points out, “In no free and fair election did the Nazis ever win more votes than the Communists and Social Democrats combined.”

On top of all these failures was the sheer, maddening difficulty of governing such a huge country. Kotkin’s Stalin is obsessed with statecraft. He continues to read Lenin, arguing with him in his mind. He is the ruler of a vast, nominally socialist empire, but none of the socialist sages have much advice for him—none had thought beyond the revolution. How is he to make sure that he is obeyed? How to make sure that his subjects are loyal? How to keep the state from being taken over (as Trotsky said had happened) by an entrenched, self-seeking bureaucracy?

Like collectivization, the Terror proceeded in stages. The first victims were the Party higher-ups who had supported the Trotskyist opposition, or failed to support collectivization. They were accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin, or of being foreign spies. From the archives we now have transcripts of Central Committee (CC) sessions like this one, from October, 1937:

Comrade Stalin has the floor. Stalin: The first question concerns membership in the CC. During the period between the June Plenum and the present Plenum several members of the CC were removed from the CC and arrested: Zelensky, who turned out to be a Tsarist secret police agent, Lebed’, Nosov, Piatnitsky, Khataevich, Ikramov, Krinitsky, Vareikis—all together 8 persons. . . . In addition, during this same period 16 persons were removed from the CC as candidate members and arrested: Grinko, Liubchenko—who shot himself to death, Yeremin, Deribas—who turned out to be a Japanese spy, Demchenko, Kalygina, Semenov, Serebrovsky—who turned out to be a spy, Shubrikov, Griadinsky, Sarkisov, Bykin, Rozengol’ts—who turned out to be a German-English-Japanese spy. Voices: Wow!

Those arrested were then tortured: forced to remain standing for days on end; beaten with fists, sticks, lamps. Their eyes were gouged out and their eardrums punctured. Some died from these beatings or were crippled; others were shot afterward. Some survived and entered the Gulag. The best known of the Bolshevik higher-ups were subjected to grotesque public trials, the transcripts of which were duly translated and circulated around the world. Western leftists racked their brains to figure out why the Old Bolsheviks confessed to crimes they could not possibly have committed. Arthur Koestler, in his novel “ Darkness at Noon ” (1940), depicted an old revolutionary who decides to confess as a final service to the revolution. In some cases, this impulse may have played a part: Kotkin describes how Lev Kamenev, Stalin’s old Pravda co-editor, and Grigory Zinoviev, who with Stalin and Kamenev had formed a ruling troika during Lenin’s final illness, were dragged out of their prison cells in 1936 for a meeting with Stalin; he urged them to confess, for old times’ sake. But they were also aware that their families were being arrested, and must have hoped to spare them.

The first phase of the Terror was seen by some as an intra-Party affair. Farmers who had been forced off their land by commissars shed no tears when they saw those commissars being arrested. The Terror soon dramatically expanded, however. One of the genuine shocks in the archives was the discovery of N.K.V.D. order No. 00447, from July 1937, “On the operation for the repression of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements.” In three neat columns, the order set quotas for executions and imprisonments by region (the third column gave the total). Four thousand to be shot in the Sverdlovsk region, six thousand to be sent to prison or to the Gulag. One thousand to be shot and thirty-five hundred imprisoned in the Odessa region. Local authorities could and did ask that these numbers be increased; the original order set executions at seventy-five thousand nine hundred and fifty, but this was eventually increased to three hundred and fifty-six thousand one hundred and five. In fact, the number shot under the order was closer to four hundred thousand. That same summer of 1937, the N.K.V.D. issued a series of orders against ethnic communities in the U.S.S.R. that were thought to be vulnerable to entreaties from the country’s enemies. Ethnic Germans and Poles bore the brunt of this, again in the hundreds of thousands. These two “operations”—targeting anti-kulak/anti-Soviet persons and the “nationalities”—made up the bulk of the million and a half arrests and nearly seven hundred thousand executions carried out in 1937 and 1938.

What was Stalin thinking? Could he possibly have believed that he had this many enemies or that his old friends were all British spies? No one knows. But Kotkin refers repeatedly to Stalin’s editing of the interrogation transcripts, which he then circulated to members of his inner circle. Apparently, Stalin was trying to make a point: he had been warning of spies in their midst, and now here was proof. He made certain that the others were up to their elbows in blood, just as he was. He would solicit their opinions; they would call for executions, as they knew they were expected to. When anyone asked for the highest measure, Stalin would inevitably approve. Here is a typical telegram from Stalin to one of his associates, from July, 1937:

J.V. Stalin to A.A. Andreev in Saratov The Central Committee agrees with your proposal to bring to court and shoot the former workers of the Machine Tractor Stations. Stalin

Vyacheslav Molotov, now Stalin’s faithful henchman, later said of the purges, “It is doubtful that these people were spies, but they were connected with spies, and the main thing is that in the decisive moment there was no relying on them.” The suspiciousness of the regime was a murderous projection of its own self-criticism. The more tyrannical Stalin became, the more people had cause to doubt him, and the more likely it became that they would abandon him. Stalin had to keep the killing going because otherwise he would never be secure.

The numbers are hard to fathom. According to the best current estimates, Stalin was responsible for between ten and twelve million peacetime deaths, including victims of the famine. But the most hands-on period of killing was the Terror of 1937 and 1938. At its height, fifteen hundred people were being shot every day. Most of the victims were ordinary citizens, caught up in a machine that was seeking to meet its quotas. But the Communist Party, too, was devastated—in many provinces, first secretaries, second secretaries, third secretaries all gone. Entire editorial staffs were erased. The officer corps of the Army was devastated. Five hundred of the top seven hundred and sixty-seven commanders were arrested or executed; thirteen of the top fifteen generals. “What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers?” Kotkin asks. “What regime, in doing so, could expect to survive?” Yet this one did. Kotkin, like Tucker before him, finds himself fantasizing about someone assassinating Stalin. No one dared. They feared for their lives, of course, but it was also in the nature of the Terror that people hoped, until it was too late, that the wave would pass them by. Those who survived the Gulag described how Communist inmates were always sure that others were guilty, that they alone were innocent. At night in the cells, they dreamed of Stalin—of meeting the leader and convincing him of their innocence.

The Terror, which had started in early 1937, ended in the fall of 1938, with the removal of the head of the N.K.V.D., Nikolai Yezhov. He was blamed for “excesses,” and eventually executed. Some of the people who’d been arrested were now released. The interrogators beat Yezhov’s underlings into confessing that he had ordered them to beat confessions out of others. And the secret police kept arresting and killing people; Isaac Babel, for example, was arrested in May, 1939, and shot eight months later.

In addition to everything else the Terror did, it greatly weakened the country’s international position. Stalin’s justified fear of the coming war made this war only more likely. The French and the British, contemplating a stand against Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938, did not feel they could count on the now depleted Red Army. Worse still, the Terror made Stalin an unacceptable ally for the British in 1939. Kotkin shows that Stalin’s first choice in the months before the war was not Hitler but Chamberlain. He sent detailed terms to Britain for a military alliance. Chamberlain was not interested, and Kotkin, refusing the benefits of hindsight, doesn’t blame him. Stalin had just murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, staged show trials of his former comrades, and carried out purges of putative socialist allies in Spain. Hitler would eventually overtake him, but as of 1939 Stalin had killed more people by far. He was, as Kotkin says, “an exceedingly awkward potential partner for the Western powers.” And then, on top of all the killing, the Soviets were also socialists who had repudiated tsarist-era debts.

Tired of waiting for the British to respond to his entreaties, Stalin invited the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Moscow. They quickly agreed to a non-aggression pact and to the carving up of Eastern Europe. The agreement was signed by Ribbentrop and Stalin’s new foreign minister, Molotov. A week later, Hitler’s troops crossed the Polish border; two weeks later, the Red Army crossed the Polish border from the other side. The Soviets captured and executed fifteen thousand Polish officers in the Katyn forest and other sites. On the German side, the Einsatzgruppen began assassinating Polish officials and intellectuals, and soon forced Stars of David onto the clothing of Polish Jews.

Hitler and Stalin never met. The closest they came was a pair of meetings that Molotov had with Hitler in Berlin, in November of 1940. Molotov took a tough line. He demanded to know what Hitler’s “New Order” would mean for Europe and Asia, and what German troops were doing in Finland and Romania. According to Hitler’s translator, “No foreign visitor had ever spoken to him in this way in my presence.” Stalin enjoyed his surrogate’s truculence, but the visit may have hastened the end of the alliance. Hitler found it insulting, and felt that it untied his hands.

Stalin soon began to receive warnings of an imminent German invasion. Despite the ravages of the Terror, his anti-Nazi spy network was still the best in the world. Hitler issued a top-secret order for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the U.S.S.R., in mid-December of 1940. Within two weeks, Stalin had an accurate description of the operation on his desk. In the months to come, as the Germans moved much of their Army and Air Force and logistics staff to the border, he received more and more warnings, and disbelieved them all.

He trusted no one, including his spies. When, in May, 1941—just six weeks before the invasion—Pavel Fitin, the head of N.K.V.D. foreign intelligence, brought him the most credible reports to date that the invasion was on its way, Stalin blew up. “You can send your ‘source’ from the headquarters of German aviation to his fucking mother,” he shouted. “This is not a source but a disinformationist.” The fact that Stalin had executed so many of his previous intelligence chiefs—in the case of military intelligence, the last five—did not encourage his intelligence officials to talk back. As Fitin, who later organized the spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project, remarked of Stalin’s blowup, “Despite our deep knowledge and firm intention to defend our point of view on the material received by the intelligence directorate, we were in an agitated state. This was the Leader of the Party and country with unimpeachable authority. And it could happen that something did not please Stalin or he saw an oversight on our part, and any one of us could end up in a very unenviable situation.”

This is the standard narrative of the months leading up to the invasion, and, once again, Kotkin helpfully complicates it. For one thing, in addition to the accurate warnings, Stalin was also receiving inaccurate ones, many of them placed there deliberately by the Germans. The most effective lie—because it was the one Stalin most wanted to believe—was that the German troop buildup at the border was a bluff that would culminate in an ultimatum from Hitler, perhaps for a long-term “lease” of Ukraine. Stalin could then stall for time. That his officer corps was not yet ready was no secret to Stalin. Even the longtime loyalist Kliment Voroshilov—Stalin’s minister of defense and an enthusiastic participant in the purges—had yelled at him, in the aftermath of the disappointing Finnish campaign of the year before, “You’re to blame for this! You annihilated the military cadres.”

Kotkin also points out that, in fact, a major mobilization of Soviet forces had taken place throughout 1941. There were nearly three million troops on the western border—a fearsome defense, but vulnerable. Stalin was afraid that Hitler would use the slightest pretext to launch an invasion, and warned his forces to do nothing provocative. Hitler, of course, was going to launch an invasion anyway. Stalin’s morbid suspiciousness and lack of scruples had kept the country out of the European war for almost two years—two years more than Tsar Nicholas II had managed with the previous war. But now time was up.

Kotkin’s second volume ends in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin on June 21, 1941, a Saturday, the eve of the German invasion. His two top commanders—Semyon Timoshenko and Giorgy Zhukov—deliver their assessment, based on the testimony of a German defector in the frontier district, that an invasion is truly imminent. Stalin is skeptical, but in Timoshenko and Zhukov, after the bloodletting at the top of the armed forces, he has finally found capable people whom he can trust. He allows them to issue an order for frontier troops to man their battle stations and disperse the Soviet Air Force away from the border.

The order was too late. By the time it went out, German saboteurs (real ones) had crossed the front lines and cut off communications. Most frontier officers heard nothing. Many would die that night in their beds. The Soviet Air Force was destroyed on the ground. In the next few months, the Germans would kill or capture much of the Soviet Army, gobble up most of Ukraine, lay siege to Leningrad, and approach Moscow. In the territories that they captured, which included most of the old Pale of Settlement, the Einsatzgruppen would begin the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. It had been a terrible decade that saw famine kill millions, and their countrymen enslave, imprison, torture, and murder millions more. But for Stalin, and for most of the people who lived in his empire, the worst was yet to come. ♦

Biography Online

Joseph Stalin Biography

Short Bio – Joseph Stalin

Stalin was born, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, on 18 December 1878 but later adopted the name of Stalin – which in Russia means man of steel.

In his early life, he only gained a rudimentary education and was drawn towards Communist ideology and became involved in robberies and violence against Tsarist sympathisers. Stalin was captured and sent to Siberia, but he managed to escape.

In 1917, Stalin played a key role in the Russian revolution; he gained control over the party newspaper Pravda and helped Lenin to escape to Finland. Stalin was one of the five-member politburos whom Lenin appointed in the Russian civil war against anti-Bolshevik forces.

During the early days of the Russian Revolution, Stalin frequently clashed with Leon Trotsky and Stalin advocated harsh measures to ensure discipline and loyalty.

In 1922, Lenin fell ill and Stalin became one of the main links between Lenin and the outside world. Lenin became increasingly distrustful of Stalin, disliking his arrogance and love of power. In Lenin’s testimony, he wanted Stalin removed from power. However, with great skill Stalin formed an alliance’s with other key Communist party members, He outmanoeuvred Trotsky and had him expelled from the Soviet Union.

On the death of Lenin, Stalin was able to assume the position as leader of the Soviet Union. He quickly strove to consolidate his power removing anyone he suspected of being disloyal.

In the 1930s, he unleashed a great wave of purges which led to the capture, torture and execution of many prominent members of the party, army and society. These purges went far beyond suspected disloyal members but became increasingly random – as if to strike fear into the heart of anyone in society.  In light of revelations from the Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) died during these purges.

In 1939, Stalin shocked the world with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact which agreed on non-aggression with Germany, and also in secret agreed to carve up Poland. When Germany attacked Poland on 1st September 1939, the Soviet Union also attacked in the East.

When Stalin was warned of an impending invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941, Stalin couldn’t believe that Adolf Hitler would attack the Soviet Union. When German forces streamed over the border, the Soviet Union was almost defenceless and German forces swept through the country reaching almost the outskirts of Moscow by 1942. However, at Stalingrad, the tide of battle was turned and slowly Russian forces pushed back the Germans beginning the long push back into Germany.

Stalin took close command of the war and went to great lengths to portray himself as the heroic war leader. He was ruthless as Supreme military commander, often having Generals shot if they lost a battle. He also made armies dig in and refuse to retreat. However, with great loss of life, the Soviet Union were finally able to prevail. When the German army was at the gates of Moscow in 1942, Stalin refused to leave, and his presence in the city helped to maintain hope.

The Germany occupation of Western Soviet Union was brutal with millions being killed by the occupying forces. As the Russian army liberated their own country and saw numerous accounts of atrocities, they, in turn, committed atrocities in their conquest of Germany. Even Soviet citizens who survived the German occupation were often arrested and deported on Stalin’s orders. He believed that many in the occupied zone had collaborated with the Germans.

After the end of the Second World War, Stalin became desperate to get the nuclear bomb, after seeing its devastating effects in Japan. This became more important as the end of the Second World War gave way to the Cold War between the US and Soviet Block. Stalin was instrumental in creating the Eastern Block and Warsaw Pact – denying Eastern European countries the opportunity to pursue democratic self-government.

Stalin died in 1953 after suffering a stroke.

Commentary on Stalin

Perhaps no other person has been so committed and so successful in achieving total power and control. Stalin was paranoid and power hungry – ruthlessly ordering the murder of millions of his own subjects on the slightest pretext of disloyalty or even threat of disloyalty.

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas? “

– Joseph Stalin

Yet, despite being utterly ruthless and vindictive against his own population, Stalin was viewed as a great war leader, who heroically stood up to the advancing Nazi war machine – Stalin is credited with overseeing the successful defence of the Soviet Union and later the advance into Germany and complete defeat of Hitler’s Germany.

His death in 1953 was mourned by millions who saw Stalin as a champion of Communism and hero of the Second World War. But, even the next Russian Premier – Nikita Khrushchev, later went onto denounce the ‘cult of personality’ that surrounded Joesph Stalin.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Stalin” , Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net 23rd May 2010. Last updated 8 February 2018.

Stalin – A biography

Stalin – A biography  by Robert Service.  “A complex and fascinating story behind this notorious twentieth-century figure.” – at Amazon. ‘

Related pages

Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower

Stalin is widely regarded as one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in history. From his childhood in the Caucasus to his career as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Robert Service explores his life and explains why he was constantly underestimated by his contemporaries

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Josef Stalin was the longest-serving leader of the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union , one of the principal architects of the postwar order and among the most ruthless tyrants to have ever lived. Undoubtedly, he was one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Robert Service explains how the young Stalin had been seduced by revolutionary ideals of the age and ultimately joined the network of Marxists operating both inside and outside the territories ruled over by the tsar. As a Bolshevik, he played a key role during the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin ultimately emerged as the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, confounding those around him who had misjudged his political acumen.

During the 1930s, his Five-Year plans drastically altered the socioeconomic makeup of the USSR at a terrible human cost. His innate paranoia then instigated a bloody purge of his one-time comrades in the Communist Party as he sought to consolidate his grip on power.

Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the most vulnerable point in his dictatorship. Nevertheless, allied with Britain and America, the Soviet dictator would play a major role in reshaping the world following the defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945.

By the time of his death in 1953, Stalinism – the ideology synonymous with his approach to statecraft and culture – had transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. But not without cost: estimated tens of millions had perished due to his decisions. This would ensure his criticism by successors.

Where and when was Stalin born?

Josef Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. Located in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas, Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time.

However, some sources specify that he was born in 1879. Stalin preferred to “stay fairly quiet about most of his background”, says Service, choosing to indulge an aura of mystery.

When did Josef Stalin pick the name ‘Stalin’ – and what does it mean?

During his initial foray into radical politics, Stalin, like other revolutionaries, adopted a series of nicknames. One of his earliest ones was ‘Koba’, inspired by the bandit protagonist in Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 novel, The Patricide .

‘Stalin’, meaning ‘man of steel’, was a revolutionary nom de guerre he adopted in 1912. It spoke to his desire to be considered formidable, as well as being, says Service, “a Russian name, not a Georgian one”.

That was important because “he was increasingly identifying with the wider Russian revolutionary movement”.

• Read more | Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century

What was Stalin’s childhood like?

Stalin’s upbringing was rough, “involving fist fights in the streets and little gangs of boys,” says Service.

Nevertheless, he was a precocious child and an adept student. This convinced his mother that he should enrol at the Tiflis (now called Tbilisi) Theological Seminary and train to become an Orthodox priest in 1894.

How did Josef Stalin become a revolutionary?

It was via Georgian nationalism that Stalin first embraced radical politics. His teachers at the Tiflis found him to be increasingly rebellious and he quit the seminary before he could qualify as a priest. “He was a rebel and he turned from faith in God to faith in revolution,” says Service.

At the turn of the 20th century, while employed at the Meteorological Observatory, Stalin began to immerse himself in key Marxist texts and the Caucasus’s revolutionary scene.

His activities soon attracted the attention of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana.

“Georgian Marxists were notorious for blackmailing and intimidating industrialists in the Georgian capital,” says Service. “He got involved in all of this and [therefore] wasn’t quite as clean-handed a Marxist as other young revolutionaries were in Russia itself. He had a reputation for combining being a Marxist with being something of a Georgian patriot, and he was definitely someone who was involved with gangsters”.

When did Stalin meet Lenin?

Stalin met Vladimir Lenin in 1905 during the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist organisation, in Tampere, Finland (then part of the Russian empire). This occurred four years after Stalin had joined the party.

In 1903, the party had split along ideological differences, into Mensheviks (the ‘minority’) led by Julius Martov, and Bolsheviks (the ‘majority’) headed by Lenin. Both factions would later form breakaway parties during 1912.

Over the following years, Stalin’s revolutionary activities would lead to him being arrested and exiled to the far-flung reaches of the tsarist realm several times.

What role did Josef Stalin play during the Russian Revolution of 1917?

Stalin, like many Bolsheviks, was living in exile (in his case Siberia rather than abroad) when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. The collapse of the Russian monarchy followed.

Though nobody knew it at the time, this February Revolution was just one of two major convulsions that would take place that year.

Émigrés and internally exiled radicals (meaning those detained in Russia’s bleak hinterlands) flocked to major cities like Moscow and the then-capital, Petrograd (now called St Petersburg). Stalin was among them.

• Read more | Books interview with Robert Service: "Nicholas II brought the Russian Revolution upon his own head"

Upon his arrival, Stalin “barged into the leadership that already existed in a small kernel of men and women in the capital,” says Service. “He basically took over the central Bolshevik party apparatus until Lenin [who had been living in Switzerland alongside other revolutionaries] returned in April 1917.

“When difficult jobs had to be done throughout that year, whether it was running the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda , or helping to set strategy in the central committee of the party, Stalin was there. He wasn’t a man who ‘missed the revolution’, as his enemies always later claimed”.

Later that year, after the Bolsheviks took power during the October Revolution , Lenin made Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. This post gave him responsibility over the new regime’s governance of the non-Russian peoples living within the wreckage of the former tsarist empire.

What was Stalin’s relationship with Lenin like?

Their working relationship following the October Revolution was relatively fruitful, though not without some disagreements. “Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing,” says Service. “Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership”.

By the 1920s, Lenin’s health – and his ability to engage in statecraft – was increasingly debilitated after a series of strokes. This would leave him largely bedridden until the end of his life in January 1924. Before Lenin's death , he recognised that both Leon Trotsky – architect of the Red Army and a convert to Bolshevism from the Menshevik faction – and Stalin, were emerging as likely successors to his leadership.

Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing... Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership

“Lenin found that the man [Stalin] that he had promoted to high party office had ideas of his own. Now, he had always had ideas of his own, but Lenin had been able to control him, moderate him when he thought necessary,” says Service.

By late 1922, the two men fell out over the position of Georgia within the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This vast new multinational polity, spanning northern Eurasia, fused the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with Soviet republics in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) on 30 December.

According to Service, Lenin “decided that if Stalin ever got into a position where he might be his successor, that would be a disaster for the party as a whole, and for the revolution itself”.

Therefore, Lenin dictated a so-called ‘testament’ that urged party comrades to remove Stalin from the post of party General Secretary. Its contents shocked Stalin and it was subsequently suppressed from wider circulation.

How did Stalin come to preside over the Soviet Union?

Following Lenin’s death, the factions within the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party hardened. Trotsky rallied party officials against what was perceived to be the creeping bureaucratisation of Soviet politics, which became synonymous with Stalin himself.

As well as Trotsky, a contingent of leading Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin also looked down on Stalin, says Service, because they thought he was an “ignorant provincial”. One contemporary, Nikolai Sukhanov, famously dismissed Stalin as “a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace”.

Stalin, for his part, played up to this image. While the others pushed for worldwide revolution, Stalin struck a much more cautious tone.

• Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster

Service says that “this appealed to numbers of Bolsheviks after the Russian Civil War who were war weary and shared Stalin’s zeal to make the revolution a success at home first before turning their eyes towards Europe”.

By the late 1920s, Stalin had outflanked his rivals within the Communist Party by forging and betraying alliances with key party figures and playing each group off against the other.

Eventually, his greatest adversary, Trotsky, was ousted from the Soviet government and first subjected to internal exile, before banishment overseas. Stalin’s rise to power also hinged on his canny self-appointment as ‘high priest’ of the emerging cult of Leninism after the Bolshevik founder’s death.

Although Stalin’s eventual mastery of the Soviet Union was contingent on this policy of ‘socialism in one country’, Service maintains that Stalin really did believe in spreading the revolution once the USSR was in a strong enough domestic position to coordinate such an offensive.

What is Stalinism?

Stalin’s dictatorship would lead to the emergence of his own cult of personality, as well as a new ideology: Stalinism.

This new phenomenon, says Service, was “a brutal extension of Leninism” and he acknowledges that “for some people this is controversial… they think that Leninism and Stalinism are totally different things. I don’t.”

Service affirms that Stalinism consolidated Leninism’s commitment to a one-party state premised on state terror and the ultimate objective of communism’s victory throughout the world. It is synonymous with the dictator’s ubiquitous presence in official propaganda, the system of state surveillance, detention and mass murder, as well as the demonisation of ‘Trotskyite’ subversion.

As a totalitarian ideology, it permeated every facet of life within the Soviet Union, from literature and painting to architecture and the naming of cities, prompting Tsaritsyn to be renamed Stalingrad (today it is Volgograd).

What was the Five-Year Plan – and how did it lead to the Holodomor?

In 1928, Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan – a colossal effort to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union and bring agriculture under state control and central planning. This latter aspect, known as Collectivisation, marked a definitive break with the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by Lenin in 1921.

The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy. Adopted in March 1921, the NEP marked a tactical retreat from the Bolsheviks’ socialist measures.

It held sway for much of the ensuing decade and reintroduced limited private ownership and commerce under the supervision of the Soviet state to bolster the economy.

Always envisaged as a temporary measure, Service points out that by the late 1920s, the regime believed that the NEP had enabled “too many nationalists, street traders and priests” to gain influence within Soviet society.

The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy

Part of the Five-Year Plan entailed individual private farms being consolidated into larger units under the supposed collective ownership of peasants known as a ‘kolkhoz’. Similarly, ‘sovkhoz’ were farms under the direct control of the state.

This also enabled Stalin to bring the class struggle (fundamental to Bolshevik ideology) to the countryside, as the previous better-off peasants – known as ‘kulaks’ – were pilloried for exploiting the poorer peasants and thus became the subject of intense persecution, including deportation from the village and, in many cases, execution.

In Ukraine, collectivisation led to mass starvation and the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants – a famine known as the ‘Holodomor’ (meaning ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian).

Although the policy also led to famine conditions in other parts of the Soviet Union, “the Ukrainians felt, with some reason, that they were being punished for being Ukrainians, as well as for being peasants,” says Service.

Why did Stalin launch the Great Terror?

The Great Terror (or Great Purge) began in 1936 and ran until 1938. It was a period marked by high profile show trials of the leading cadre of Bolsheviks that had been active during and since the October Revolution. The suspects were accused of conniving with Trotsky to sabotage the Soviet state and murder Stalin.

As Service explains, the Great Terror’s “main purpose was to annihilate any kind of opposition, real or potential”.

Confessions were typically extracted under torture and the guilty were subsequently executed as ‘enemies of the people’ or sentenced to long periods of servitude in labour camps. The wave of terror later spread to the Red Army and members of the intelligentsia – the educated group of Soviet society.

Stalin was a deeply suspicious individual by nature. He was also aware that the violent methods inflicted on the Soviet Union during the first and second Five-Year Plans, had made some of his comrades within the Communist Party deeply uneasy.

In December 1934, one of Stalin’s most loyal comrades in the regime, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad. His murder was blamed on a Trotskyite plot whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Stalin himself.

Some historians have suggested, however, that Kirov’s murder was ordered by Stalin who had come to regard him as a potential rival. Kirov’s demise also provided Stalin with the pretext to point the finger at alleged traitors within the state apparatus.

Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode. “He thought that he could replace them with a new young elite that he would train to fulfil the industrial, agricultural, commercial and political tasks of the new Soviet state”, says Service.

Furthermore, Service explains that the Great Terror was a reflection of “the most terrible human pessimism by Stalin, combined with an extreme optimism that you could do this to a country… and come out at the other end of the tunnel with a new state that would be more pliable, more obedient, and would be able to present itself to the rest of the world as offering a vision of the communist future”.

The latter half of the 1930s became “a very gruelling period, a tormenting period in which nearly all the close associates of Lenin were exterminated… Trotsky was the last” – he was assassinated in exile in 1940.

Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode

But the Great Terror was not solely reserved for the party’s upper echelons. Wherever you were in the party, you stood a high chance of being arrested and thrown into a labour camp, or shot after being beaten up, tortured and forced to sign a confession.

At its height, an estimated 2.5 million people languished in the Soviet Union’s extensive penal system – the notorious ‘Gulag archipelago’. Gulag is the Russian abbreviation for the Main Administration of Correctional-Labour Camps. This supplied a constant stream of slave labour to the state’s industrial and economic drive.

How many people perished under Stalin’s rule?

The precise number of people who were killed during Stalin’s rule is difficult to ascertain with any precision, but Stalin is acknowledged as one of the most brutal leaders in history.

“It’s in the tens of millions,” says Service. “It’s a staggering number of people, and it’s not just those who were executed or thrown into the Gulag. There are also people who died as a result of the catastrophic effects of the economic and social policies that he unleashed from the end of the 1920s onwards”.

Why did Stalin sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler?

In summer 1939, Stalin shocked communists around the world by signing a non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The years leading up to that point had seen Stalin increasingly perturbed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Nazism, and its overtly anti-Bolshevik agenda, was of acute concern to the Soviet Union’s security.

Stalin had aided and abetted the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), who were fighting a military rebellion backed by Europe’s fascist powers. When it became apparent that the Spanish Republic was doomed, he estimated that his best chance of avoiding trouble with Hitler lay in diverting Hitler’s focus westwards to the capitalist states.

• Read more | Hitler and Stalin’s utopian dreams

A key part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact entailed the two powers invading and dividing Poland between them. Just over two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, triggering the Second World War, the Soviet Union began annexing eastern Poland on 17 September 1939.

As Red Army forces surged into the occupied territory, they began targeting leading Polish intellectuals, army officers and other luminaries. “Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the secret police, [had] concocted a plan to round them all up,” explains Service.

This led to the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940, during which approximately 22,000 members of the Polish elite and intelligentsia were systematically murdered. The bodies were then dumped in mass graves inside the Katyn forest.

How did the Second World War impact Stalin?

When Hitler ultimately acted on his ideological conviction of attacking the Soviet Union, and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Stalin was stunned.

“He would not take advice in 1941 that Hitler really did mean to launch an invasion,” says Service, “He thought that he was being misled either by Western powers who sought to involve him in their war against Hitler, or there were just saboteurs inside the Soviet Union against the communist leadership. He got it catastrophically wrong”.

After initial paralysis and the loss of vast swathes of territory, the Soviet elite persuaded Stalin to lead the fightback. He was forced to forge an alliance with his sworn capitalist enemies – notably the dogged anti-Bolshevik British prime minister, Winston Churchill .

• Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans

Appeals to Russian nationalism suffused wartime propaganda, while many of the Soviet Union’s great cities – from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to Kyiv and Stalingrad endured staggering hardship at the hands of Nazi aggression.

The Nazis’ discovery of the mass graves within the Katyn forest in April 1943 was used by Hitler to try and drive a wedge between the Allies. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile, and the atrocity was later covered up and blamed on the Nazis themselves (a line that Moscow stuck to until 1990) once the Red Army had wrested back control of the area.

Although the Soviet Union had lost over 27 million lives since 1941 and was among the most battered powers to have fought Nazi Germany, on 9 May 1945, it proclaimed victory over the Third Reich, with much of Eastern and Central Europe now under Stalin’s control.

What role did Stalin play during the Cold War?

The Soviet Union emerged from the war as one of the two new superpowers that would hold sway over the world for the next four decades. Initially, Stalin hoped that the wartime alliance would somehow endure.

According to Service, Stalin anticipated that the Soviet Union “would be allowed to more or less do as it wanted in Eastern Europe without interference from the Western powers, and he hoped that he might get economic assistance from America in the short term, even though he expected there to be trouble with the United States in the longer term”.

However, by the late 1940s, the Marshall Plan – the US aid package designed to revive Europe’s post-war economies – was quickly perceived by Stalin as a threat to the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe.

“From that point on, there was a clash between the US and the USSR [but] both sides wanted to avoid a hot war,” says Service. “Stalin then put his foot down on the throat of all the existing half-freedoms in Eastern Europe and fully communised those countries in a brutal period of trials, arrests and the suppression of rival political parties across half of the European mainland”.

How did Stalin die?

In the early hours of 1 March 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke while staying in one of his dachas (a countryside retreat) in Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. His staff, who were too frightened to disturb him, eventually found Stalin unconscious, lying on the floor.

High-ranking members of the Soviet government such as Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov, flocked to the dacha. “They decided that the best thing to do was not to touch him,” says Service.

The rationale behind this was that, if by some miracle, he recovered, then none of them could have been accused of having held a gun to his head or of having plunged a knife into his back. Despite this, rumours that the dictator was poisoned persist today.

Stalin dwindled over the next few days before succumbing on 5 March 1953, aged 74.

His death triggered a surge of grief within the Soviet Union. “As much as many millions of people hated him, perhaps the same people also somehow thought that something had been pulled out of their lives, too,” explains Service. He was embalmed and displayed alongside Lenin’s preserved body in the mausoleum on Red Square.

In 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the Soviet Communist Party, in which he denounced Stalin’s murderous excesses and cult of personality, led to de-Stalinisation.

Finally, in 1961, Stalin’s remains were removed from the mausoleum and buried in a grave along the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

• Read more | A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends

Danny Bird is the Staff Writer at BBC History Magazine. Danny Bird is the Staff Writer at BBC History Magazine and previously held the same role on BBC History Revealed. He joined the brand in 2022. Fascinated with the past since childhood, Danny completed his History BA at the University of Sheffield, developing a special interest in the Spanish Civil War and the Paris Commune. He subsequently gained his History MA from University College London, studying at its School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

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Last updated: February 10, 2023

Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953 and as one of the great political monsters of the 20th century—responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths—he's also a subject of fascination with a lot of books written about him. Born Joseph Dzhugashvili in Georgia, then a part of the Russian Empire, in 1878, he remains the epitome of the dictator able to transform their country through violence and sheer political will. His legacy continues to haunt Russia, long after the collapse of communism, with President Vladimir Putin openly admiring his strong-man political character.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History explores the structure of the system of mass incarceration and terror through which he ran the Soviet Union. The classic Eastern Approaches, by British diplomat Fitzroy Maclean, gives a firsthand description of life in Moscow during Stalin's show trials. For a novel laying bare how Stalin maintained control, British historian and Russia specialist Orlando Figes recommends The First Circle by  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Stalin's personality can be explored through Milovan Djilas’ first-hand account of Stalin’s ‘court’ . In Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Young Stalin you can find the man behind the monster and understand something of what formed him and what drove him (he even trained briefly as a priest). In Stalin’s Library and Stalin’s Scribe you can his relationship to culture and Russia’s literary world. Stalin was an avid reader and had a library of more than 20,000 books; many have his jottings in the margins.

Young Stalin

By simon sebag montefiore.

***LA Times Book Prize for Best Biography 2007***

Read expert recommendations

“You can see in the young Stalin considerable signals that he is a very strange man of certain twitches, but a man of great charisma. I suppose the question that Sebag Montefiore doesn’t ask is whether Stalin’s imprisonments made him worse than he would have been otherwise. Stalin was a great bank robber, the Butch Cassidy of the Bolsheviks. He was not a hugely advanced thinker but he definitely had a sense of what was wrong with his time and place.” Read more...

The best books on Revolutionary Russia

Thomas Keneally , Novelist

Gulag: A History

By anne applebaum.

***Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction ***

***Winner of the 2003 Duff Cooper Prize (for nonfiction)***

“To see what Stalin did to Russia, the best book is Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. Based on detailed archival research, she tells of the sudden arrests, the sham trials, the gruelling transportation, the hardships of labour camps, starvation and disease – and also the way in which modern Russia is unwilling to come to terms with them” Read more...

The best books on Contemporary Russia

Edward Lucas , Journalist

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

***Winner of the 2017 Duff Cooper Prize (for nonfiction)***

***Winner of the 2018 Lionel Gelber Prize   (for a nonfiction book about international affairs)***

Red Famine is Anne Applebaum’s prizewinning book about the Holodomor (1932-3) a “term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger— holod —and extermination— mor.” Nearly 4 million Ukrainians died as Stalin deliberately set out to make a famine caused by collectivization worse.

The First Circle

By aleksandr solzhenitsyn.

***Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature ***

“What this book helped me to do is think of Stalin as a cross between Big Brother and the Wizard of Oz. His presence is everywhere, but he’s nowhere and doesn’t really show himself very much. And, actually, in those four chapters, the real Stalin is this rather pathetic, elderly man with yellow teeth who doesn’t wash. He’s just insignificant, somehow. He doesn’t command respect or authority from his persona. He commands authority because of the system he’s at the center of.”

Orlando Figes , interview on the best Russian novels , 31 August, 2022

“The Gulag is a very microcosmic, intensive form of Stalinism and other writers—like Shalamov for example—have described the Gulag in a way that is unforgettable. But as a broad canvas, albeit set in a very privileged part of the Gulag, of how this Nineteen Eighty-Four world works, The First Circle does more than any other book to get us there.” Read more...

The Best Russian Novels

Orlando Figes , Historian

Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books

By geoffrey roberts.

“If you’re reading this, you probably like books and may be disappointed to learn that Stalin was also a voracious reader. Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books is by British historian Geoffrey Roberts, author of several books on the Russian leader (plus one on Zhukov). Stalin had more than 20,000 books in his library and they weren’t just for show.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early 2022

Sophie Roell , Journalist

Conversations with Stalin

By milovan djilas.

“Djilas was Tito’s number two, and negotiated with the Kremlin on various diplomatic missions. He’s a terrific source on the grotesque late-Stalin court – the ghastly, drunken, late-night banquets at Stalin’s dacha, the bullying, fear and paranoia; the way the whole Kremlin circle was completely cut off from reality. Stalin had always been suspicious of Leningrad, disliking its Europhile bent and fearing it as an alternative centre of power. After the war, he purged the city’s party leadership and cracked down on its intelligentsia, most famously on the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose son, having been released from the Gulag to fight for his country, was sent straight back to the camps. Stalin did not, however, engineer the siege–which is one theory that has been around.” Read more...

The best books on The Siege of Leningrad

Anna Reid , Journalist

Stalin’s Genocides

By norman naimark.

A short book (less than 200 pages) on Stalin's crimes by American historian and genocide expert Norman Naimark. As he points out, there is considerable disagreement about how many were killed as a result of Stalin’s policies and actions and a lot depends on how ones defines 'mass killing.' Naimark comes down on a figure of 15 to 20 million dead as a result of Stalin’s policies from 1928 to 1953.

The Silent Steppe: The Story of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin

By mukhamet shayakhmetov.

This is a firsthand account, matter-of-fact in tone, by a Kazakh herder of his life growing up in 20th century Kazakhstan. Born in 1922, Mukhamet Shayakhmetov's life revolves around his 'aul', the traditional Kazakh family grouping that is both abstract and the collection of yurts that moves around between winter and summer—with herds of camels, horses, cattle and sheep. He is just 7 years old when Stalin's campaign to dispossess the kulaks reaches Altai in 1929, netting first his uncle and then his father. By 9 he is acting as the man in the family, going long distances on horseback on his own to get food for his father in prison. He manages to survive both the Kazakh famine and the Great Patriot War, fighting in the army at Stalingrad. It's a tragic tale, the lack of comprehension of the Kazakh herders at what the Soviet bureaucratic state was up to painful to read. Early in the book, when the political persecution is just getting going, he's at a trial and notes how everyone was astonished by the proceedings: "some even dared to laugh."

Eastern Approaches

By fitzroy maclean.

“Maclean was one of the great characters of the 20th century. He was a junior diplomat in Moscow in the late 30s and then went on to join the SAS. During the war he kidnapped a Persian general who had collaborated with the Nazis. He was also a friend of Ian Fleming and partly an inspiration for the James Bond character. His account of the Soviet Union in the 30s was quite brilliant. A lot of journalists in those days were making excuses for communism, suggesting it was a hope for the future and were putting the best possible spin on it. But his account showed the whole hopelessness of the Soviet empire – its incompetence and its evilness. He did a brilliant account of the great Stalin purge trials, when most of the leading communists of the day were destroyed by Stalin. That whole bleak period was brilliantly described by Maclean. He showed up the hollowness and incompetence of the whole Soviet system. This is a very carefully worded account of life in those early days after the revolution, one of the first exposés of that system. He tells one particular story when he was a young diplomat. He went to a cocktail party and had a relationship with a young Russian ballet dancer who then disappeared. He had a phone call from her mother saying she’d disappeared and that she’d never forgive him.” Read more...

The best books on Spies

Richard Beeston , Foreign Correspondent

Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov

By brian boeck.

***Mikhail Sholokhov was winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature ***

“With Sholokhov what is interesting is that he’s a man of many mysteries. It’s about the question of lies and fake news, but in a different way than we deal with it now. He’s someone who becomes the ideal Soviet writer. But his official biography has a lot of lacunas. Certain things are hidden, and other things are actually exaggerated and Brian Boeck goes through that. Sholokhov is a man who wrote so much and was politically exceptionally important, but this is the first comprehensive biography about him. It’s a political biography, but not only. There are questions, like whether his best known and most brilliant work, And Quiet Flows the Don , was stolen or not, whether he really wrote it or not, what his relationship with Stalin was. In my reading, it’s about a talent being subdued and corrupted…It’s an excellent piece of work by a historian. Boeck goes and consults the archives, some materials for the first time. He was going on an almost yearly basis to the area from which Sholokhov comes, the Rostov-on-Don area in southern Russia…It’s the work of a Western scholar who is really very immersed in his subject and in the psychology of the place that he writes about. He brings so to speak local knowledge and sensibilities to a history of one of the top Soviet intellectuals.” Read more...

The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize

Serhii Plokhy , Historian

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Understanding Stalin

Russian archives reveal that he was no madman, but a very smart and implacably rational ideologue.

How did Stalin become Stalin? Or, to put it more precisely: How did Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili—the grandson of serfs, the son of a washerwoman and a semiliterate cobbler—become Generalissimo Stalin, one of the most brutal mass murderers the world has ever known? How did a boy born in an obscure Georgian hill town become a dictator who controlled half of Europe? How did a devout young man who chose to study for the priesthood grow up to become a zealous atheist and Marxist ideologue?

Under Freud’s influence, many ambitious biographers—not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians—have sought answers in their subject’s childhood. Just as Hitler’s fanaticism has been “explained” by his upbringing, his sex life, or his alleged single testicle, so has Stalin’s psychopathic cruelty been attributed to the father who, in Stalin’s own words, “thrashed him mercilessly,” or to the mother who may have had an affair with a local priest. Other accounts have featured the accident that left Stalin with a withered arm, the smallpox infection that badly scarred his face, or the birth defect that joined two of his toes and gave him a webbed left foot—the mark of the devil.

Politics have influenced Stalin’s biographers too. During his lifetime, sympathizers made him into a superhero, but opponents have imposed their prejudices as well. Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward. Trotsky’s Stalin was lacking in wit and gaiety, an unlettered and provincial man who obtained power through bureaucratic manipulation and brute violence. Above all, Trotsky’s Stalin was a turncoat who betrayed first Lenin and then the Marxist cause. It was a portrait that served a purpose, inspiring Trotskyites to remain faithful to the Soviet revolution that “could have been”—if only Trotsky had come to power instead of the gray, guarded, cynical Stalin.

Since the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s, these politicized and psychologized accounts of Stalin’s life have begun to unravel. Politics still influence how he is publicly remembered: in recent years, Russian leaders have played down Stalin’s crimes against his own people, while celebrating his military conquest of Europe. But the availability of thousands of once-secret documents and previously hidden caches of memoirs and letters has made it possible for serious historians to write the more interesting truth. Drawing on contacts in Tbilisi and Moscow for his Young Stalin , the historian and journalist Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, offers a portrait of the dictator as a youthful rabble-rouser, Lothario, poet, and pamphleteer—hardly the lumpen bureaucrat of Trotsky’s imagination. Digging deep and long in obscure archival collections, the Russian academic Oleg Khlevniuk has produced marvelously detailed accounts of the incremental evolution of the Soviet Communist Party from the chaos of the revolution into what eventually became Stalinism. Khlevniuk’s books—alongside the edited letters of Stalin to two of his sidekicks, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, and dozens of published documents on the history of the Gulag, of collectivization, of the Ukrainian famine, of the KGB—show that Stalin did not create the Soviet dictatorship through mere trickery. Nor did he do it alone. He was helped by a close circle of equally dedicated men, as well as thousands of fanatical secret policemen.

In an exceptionally ambitious biography— the first volume of a projected three takes us from Stalin’s birth, in 1878, up to 1928 in just under 1,000 pages—Stephen Kotkin, a history professor at Princeton, sets out to synthesize the work of these and hundreds of other scholars. His goal in Stalin is to sweep the cobwebs and the mythology out of Soviet historiography forever. He dismisses the Freudians right away, arguing that nothing about Stalin’s early life was particularly unusual for a man of his age and background. Sergei Kirov, a member of Stalin’s inner circle, grew up in an orphanage after his alcoholic father abandoned the family and his mother died of tuberculosis. Grigory Ordzhonikidze, another crony, had lost both his parents by the time he was 10. The young Stalin, by contrast, had a mother who, despite her background, was ambitious and energetic, mobilizing her extended family on her talented son’s behalf.

More important, Kotkin notes, young Stalin stood out in late-19th-century Tiflis not because he was especially thuggish but because he was a remarkable student. By the age of 16, he had made his way into the Tiflis seminary, the “highest rung of the educational ladder in the Caucasus … a stepping-stone to a university elsewhere in the empire.” He eventually dropped out of school, drifting into the shadowy world of far-left politics, but remained a charismatic personality. In Baku, where he went in 1907 to agitate among the oil workers, he engaged in “hostage taking for ransom, protection rackets, piracy,” as well as the odd political assassination. He moved in and out of prison, showing a special facility for dramatic escapes and adopting a wide range of aliases and disguises.

Slowly, Kotkin builds the case for quite a different interpretation of Stalin—and for quite a few other things, too. The book’s signature achievement, and its main fault, is its vast scope: Kotkin has set out to write not only the definitive life of Stalin but also the definitive history of the collapse of the Russian empire and the creation of the new Soviet empire in its place. His canvas is crowded with details from the lives of Bismarck and Mussolini, as well as the czarist politicians Sergei Witte, Pyotor Stolypin, and Pyotor Durnovo; the czar and the czarina themselves; and of course Lenin, Trotsky, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Nikolai Bukharin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, just for starters.

Year by year, crisis by crisis, a fine-grained picture of Stalin’s intellectual development nevertheless emerges. It is easy to forget, but on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late 30s and had nothing to show for his life. He had “no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry,” meaning that he wrote articles for illegal newspapers. He certainly had no training in statecraft, and no experience managing anything at all. The Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917 brought him and his comrades their first, glorious taste of success. Their unlikely revolution—the result of Lenin’s high-risk gambles—validated their obscure and fanatical ideology. More to the point, it brought them personal security, fame, and power they had never before known.

As a result, most Bolshevik leaders continued to seek guidance in this ideology, and Stalin was no exception. In later years, outsiders would listen incredulously to the wooden pronouncements of the Soviet leadership and ask whether they could possibly be sincere. Kotkin’s answer is yes. Unlike the uneducated cynic of Trotsky’s imagination, the real Stalin justified each and every decision using ideological language, both in public and in private. It is a mistake not to take this language seriously, for it proves an excellent guide to his thinking. More often than not, he did exactly what he said he would do.

Certainly this was true in the realm of economics. The Bolsheviks, Kotkin rightly notes, were driven by “a combination of ideas or habits of thought, especially profound antipathy to markets and all things bourgeois, as well as no-holds-barred revolutionary methods.” Right after the revolution, these convictions led them to outlaw private trade, nationalize industry, confiscate property, seize grain and redistribute it in the cities—all policies that required mass violence to implement. In 1918, Lenin himself suggested that peasants should be forced to deliver their grain to the state, and that those who refused should be “shot on the spot.”

Although some of these policies, including forced grain requisitions, were temporarily abandoned in the 1920s, Stalin brought them back at the end of the decade, eventually enlarging upon them. And no wonder: they were the logical consequence of every book he had read and every political argument he had ever had. Stalin, as Kotkin reveals him, was neither a dull bureaucrat nor an outlaw but a man shaped by rigid adherence to a puritanical doctrine. His violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist-Leninist ideology.

This ideology offered Stalin a deep sense of certainty in the face of political and economic setbacks. If policies designed to produce prosperity created poverty instead, an explanation could always be found: the theory had been incorrectly interpreted, the forces were not correctly aligned, the officials had blundered. If Soviet policies were unpopular, even among workers, that too could be explained: antagonism was rising because the class struggle was intensifying.

Whatever went wrong, the counterrevolution, the forces of conservatism, the secret influence of the bourgeoisie could always be held responsible. These beliefs were further reinforced by the searing battles of 1918–20 between the Red and White Armies. Over and over again, Stalin learned that violence was the key to success. “Civil war,” Kotkin writes, “was not something that deformed the Bolsheviks; it formed them … [providing] the opportunity to develop and to validate the struggle against ‘exploiting classes’ and ‘enemies’ (domestic and international), thereby imparting a sense of seeming legitimacy, urgency, and moral fervor to predatory methods.”

For Stalin, the civil war was especially formative, since it gave him his first experience of executive power. In 1918, he was sent to the city of Tsaritsyn, strategically situated along the Volga River and the site of an important rail junction. His mission was to secure food for the starving workers of Moscow and Petrograd—to confiscate grain, in other words, and to serve, in effect, as the “Bolshevik bandit-in-chief.” To meet the challenge, he granted himself military powers, took over the local branch of the secret police, and stole 10 million rubles from another group of Bolsheviks. When the rail lines failed to function as he wished, he executed the local technical specialists, calling them “class aliens.” He disposed of other suspected counterrevolutionaries, Kotkin argues, “not from sadism or panic, but as a political strategy, to galvanize the masses,” warning his followers that internal foes of the revolution were about to stage a rebellion, recapture the city, and hand it over to the White Army: “Here, in tiniest embryo, was the scenario of countless fabricated trials of the 1920s and 30s.”

These methods almost led to the military collapse of Tsaritsyn, and Lenin was eventually persuaded to recall Stalin to Moscow. But they did produce the grain. And after the civil war ended, Stalin’s military failures were forgotten. Tsaritsyn was even renamed Stalingrad. This pattern would repeat itself throughout Stalin’s life. Time after time, when faced with a huge crisis, he would use extralegal, “revolutionary methods” to solve it. Sometimes the result was to prolong and deepen the crisis. But if he was sufficiently ruthless, all opposition ultimately melted away. Kotkin’s first volume ends with Stalin’s announcement of his decision to collectivize Soviet agriculture. Enacting that policy would require the displacement, the imprisonment, and eventually the orchestrated starvation of millions of people, and it resulted in Stalin’s complete political triumph.

In the contemporary West, we often assume that perpetrators of mass violence must be insane or irrational, but as Kotkin tells the story, Stalin was neither. And in its way, the idea of Stalin as a rational and extremely intelligent man, bolstered by an ideology sufficiently powerful to justify the deaths of many millions of people, is even more terrifying. It means we might want to take more seriously the pronouncements of the Russian politicians who have lately argued for the use of nuclear weapons against the Baltic states, or of the ISIS leaders who call for the deaths of all Christians and Jews. Just because their language sounds strange to us doesn’t mean that they, and those who follow them, don’t find it compelling, or that they won’t pursue their logic to its ultimate conclusion.

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By Jennifer Siegel

• Nov. 26, 2014

Two contrasting pictures emerge from the appraisals of Joseph Stalin written by his revolutionary colleagues and competitors. On the one hand, there was, for example, a fellow Georgian who knew Stalin in his early years as a Bolshevik organizer and who describes “his unquestionably greater energy, indefatigable capacity for hard work, unconquerable lust for power and above all his enormous particularistic organizational talent.” On the other, there are the unflattering judgments of his most virulent opponents in the Bolshevik hierarchy, from Leon Trotsky, who thought Stalin the “outstanding mediocrity of our party,” to Lev Kamenev, who considered the man who came to preside over the vast expanses of the reconstituted Russian empire “a small-town politician.”

For Stephen Kotkin, the John P. Birkelund professor in history and international affairs at Princeton University, it is clearly the first assessment that comes closer to the truth. In “Stalin. Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” a masterly account that is the first of a projected three-volume study, Kotkin paints a portrait of an autodidact, an astute thinker, “a people person” with “surpassing organizational abilities; a mammoth appetite for work; a strategic mind and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.”

Kotkin traces the major episodes of Stalin’s life up to 1928: his origins in the imperial borderland of Georgia as Iosif (Soso) Dzhughashvili, the son of an artisan shoemaker cursed by downward mobility, and his beautiful wife, who was always ambitious for her only surviving child; his youth as a decorated schoolboy, then rebellious seminarian; his days as a revolutionary organizer in Batum, Chiatura and Baku, interspersed with years spent in internal exile in northern Russia — what Kotkin designates the fragile cycle of “prison, exile, poverty”; his heady days as a member of Lenin’s inner circle in the aftermath of the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power and during the subsequent civil war that, as Trotsky later wrote, molded Stalin; his ascension, at Lenin’s behest, to the position of general secretary of the party, later marred by the disparaging and possibly apocryphal text of Lenin’s so-called testament — a series of dictations in which Lenin, seriously incapacitated by a number of strokes, reputedly discredited six likely successors to his rule, with Stalin prominently included; his establishment of a personal dictatorship over the Bolshevik regime and the excoriation and political or physical exile of his rivals; the first show trials and the movement toward rapid industrialization, including the brutal forced collectivization of agriculture, that Kotkin promises will be the story of Volume II and that he considers to be Stalin’s great historical accomplishment, “rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one-sixth of the earth.”

Though the outlines of Stalin’s story are well known, Kotkin makes an enormous effort to debunk some of the myths. Stalin’s later brutality was, in Kotkin’s opinion, a response neither to childhood abuse at the hands of his father nor to the repressive surveillance and arbitrary governance under which he lived while a student at the seminary in what was then Tiflis. He was no more (though possibly no less) of a swashbuckling Lothario or brigand than many of his revolutionary comrades. He was not especially duplicitous toward his colleagues, nor was he especially effective in his early organization of the workers’ movements in the Caucasus.

And Kotkin offers the sweeping context so often missing from all but the best biographies. In his introductory chapter, he makes the lofty assertion that a life of Stalin is akin to “a history of the world,” and while that claim is rather immoderate, he delivers not only a history of late imperial Russia and of the revolution and early Soviet state, but also frequent commentary on the global geopolitical forces in play. He deftly explores the collapse of “Russia’s vicious, archaic autocracy” under fire in World War I. He is no less artful in explaining the evolution from what he calls the absurdist and “unintentionally Dada-esque Bolshevik stab at rule” in the immediate wake of the October Revolution to the construction of the Communist state during the course of the civil war. As he insists: “Forcibly denying others a right to rule is not the same as ruling and controlling resources.” But the methods of control the Bolsheviks developed were steeped in the violent practices that can be traced directly to the old regime.

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Rose Deller

February 17th, 2016, long read review: the writing and re-writing of joseph stalin and his regime: a critical comparison of two biographies.

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The Writing and Re-Writing of Joseph Stalin and His Regime: A Critical Comparison of Two Biographies.

This comparative review examines two works that use new documents to further explore Joseph Stalin’s life and regime. Stalin: New Biography of a New Dictator , by Oleg Khlevniuk , and Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 ,  by Stephen Kotkin , have both been positioned as the ultimate biography of Stalin. Vlad Onaciu explores the different methodological approaches taken by two writers attempting to separate the myth from the reality of Stalin’s regime.

Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator . Oleg Khlevniuk. Yale University Press. 2015.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. Stephen Kotkin. Allen Lane. 2014.

Oleg Khlevniuk’s Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator and Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Paradoxes of Power , 1878-1928 represent two of the latest attempts at offering new interpretations, both books having been hailed as Stalin’s ultimate biography. Previously, others such as Robert Conquest ( Stalin: Destroyer of Nations ), Simon Sebag Montefiore ( Young Stalin and The Court of the Red Tsar ), Dmitri Volkogonov ( Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy ), Adam Ulam ( Stalin: The Man and His Era ) and Robert C. Tucker ( Stalin as Revolutionary and Stalin in Power ) have all tried to further clarify the motivations behind the Great Terror and other crimes. The last two are particularly noteworthy, for, as Khlevniuk aptly puts it, they offered highly pertinent interpretations at a time when access to archival sources was impossible.

For those familiar with the historical study of the Soviet Union, both Kotkin and Khlevniuk are very well-known, having made important contributions in areas such as society, economy and politics. Kotkin is the author of the ground-breaking Magnetic Mountain (1995), which served to create a new interpretational paradigm by moving focus from the sociological approach to understanding the individual strategies and modes of adaptation to the rules of the Stalinist Era. Khlevniuk has conversely focused most of his research on analysis of the Red Tsar’s inner circle, thus making him one of the foremost experts on the Soviet elite and the functioning of its political system (see also  Master of the House: Stalin and his Inner Circle and Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle ). His biography of the dictator is therefore obligatory reading.

The narrative style of each author is the perfect window not only into their interpretations, but also into their respective approaches to history. Khlevniuk chose to rely heavily on a story placed on two temporal levels, with the present being the hours before Stalin’s death and his past life reconstructed through flashbacks. This constitutes an original instrument through which to immerse readers in the narrative. However, the approach remains linear in respecting chronological order, therefore making the book accessible for non-specialist readers as well. Kotkin, on the other hand, takes a more traditional approach to his work in choosing the strictly chronological method of telling the story, although he offers a broader interpretation of the past.

Image Credit: German Federal Archives ( Wikipedia Public Domain )

Placing a figure of Stalin’s size outside its own mythology and within grand history is anything but an easy feat. Khlevniuk, while not ignoring the broader context of historical events, focuses more on Stalin the individual and his development into the infamous Red Tsar, with the fate of the Russian Empire playing out in the background. While he undertakes a marvellous psychological analysis of Stalin’s childhood, a not-so-common approach in existing historical research, he overemphasises Stalin’s culpability, which tends to give the impression that the author is playing the role of judge. This probably stems from his determination to counter the new wave of Stalinist apologists. While he does not straightforwardly mention individuals by their name, it is quite obvious that this is a reference to the Putin regime’s tendency towards restoring Stalin’s image. On the other hand, Kotkin is somewhat more ambitious as he not only aims to illustrate and explain Stalin’s development as a young revolutionary, but also to merge this individualised account with grand history: a difficult balance to attain. This makes his book not only a biography, but also one of the best works on modern Russia, moving from the decline and fall of the Tsarist Empire to the rise of the Soviet Union.

How historians choose to treat their sources is crucial. Both authors have used archives as the core of their research, and stress their importance for understanding Stalin’s complex system of relationships and power. Yet there is a difference, as Khlevniuk states from the very beginning that he uses only the most reliable sources, and that it is on these that he builds his entire analysis. On the other hand, Kotkin shows more openness to using a more diverse set of sources. This does not mean Khlevniuk chooses to ignore these entirely, but that memoirs and diaries are renowned for their subjectivity, which he considers a hindrance in properly understanding and explaining Stalin’s life. Of course, this does not stop him from praising Montefiore’s efforts, which relied heavily on the statements of former Soviet elites. Kotkin presents a mix between the two, and this might stem from two reasons: firstly, his past research has been an attempt at merging the revisionist approach with attention upon the individual. Secondly, this is but the first volume of a trilogy, allowing him to expand on as many issues as he sees necessary. Khlevniuk’s biography is more condensed, as he himself admits there was a need to select which aspects he was going to write about, and which to leave out.

Stalin’s relationship to the leading circle has been a central point of academic debate. Khlevniuk insists on the Soviet dictator’s influence and control over these individuals, arguing that they had far less power than previously thought. The idea of Stalin dividing the members of the Politburo, and even turning them against each other, is widely spread among scholars, and rightfully so, but Khlevniuk’s overemphasis on Stalin’s guilt might reduce that which is also attributable to members of the Politburo; after all, Lavrentiy Beria is perceived by many to have been the architect of the Gulag system, and Lazar Kaganovich as having an important role in the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, which, according to both Norman Naimark and Timothy Snyder, can be seen as an attempt at crushing any remaining national tendencies (see Stalin’s Genocides and Bloodlands respectively). Then again, Khlevniuk harshly criticises the memoirs of the former Soviet elite in remaining silent on issues of mass repression, as if to hide their own involvement. Thus it would not be possible to argue that he does not take into account their contributions to the sufferings of the Great Terror.

What both authors insist upon is Stalin’s successful bid for power and his relationship with Lenin and other early Bolshevik leaders. They agree that his political abilities were no secret, and that all party members knew what he was capable of achieving. Where they diverge is with regards to Lenin’s perception of, and plans for, Stalin. While Khlevniuk argues that by 1922 this relationship had ceased to be a harmonious one, Kotkin believes that Lenin’s actions prove otherwise in that he kept promoting Stalin through the hierarchy, and that Trotsky lacked any real popularity as he had a mainly condescending attitude and was often in conflict with his Bolshevik comrades. Furthermore, Kotkin tackles the famed ‘Secret Testament’, supposedly dictated by Lenin on his deathbed, in which he warned against allowing Stalin to become the new leader and named Trotsky as his successor, which Kotkin holds to be nothing more than a forgery meant to put pressure on the Soviet dictator. What both authors agree upon is Stalin’s continuous division of his enemies and allies, either by limiting their access to information or by the manipulation of their interests and vanity.

Nearing the end of our critical reading of these two biographies, we must ponder on the significance of interpretation in historical research as it greatly influences how various sources are used. Both Khlevniuk and Kotkin have used archives, and while their conclusions and main assertions have mostly coincided, the overall approach and even their aims differ. There is no saying as to which is the best biography; rather, we should perceive them as complementary works constructing a comprehensive image of Stalin and his regime.

Vlad Onaciu is currently a second-year PhD student in the Faculty of History and Philosophy at ‘Babes-Bolyai’ University where he previously finished his BA and MA in contemporary history. His doctoral research focuses on issues regarding the lives of workers in factories during the communist regime in Romania. His academic interests include the history of communism, oral history, international relations (mainly civilisational studies) and 19th and 20th Century history in general. Read more reviews by Vlad Onaciu .

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

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The “Comparative Review: The Writing and Re-Writing of Joseph Stalin and His Regime: A Critical Comparison of Two Biographies” by Vlad Onaciu is particularly helpful not only in making the comparison of the two biographies of Stalin, but more importantly by specifically and expressly pointing out to the reader differences that the two authors took with respect to:

• Different methodological approaches • new interpretations • different temporal levels (flashbacks versus strict chronology) • different sources

The reader of the comparative review, as a result, will come away from a reading of the comparison better prepared to do their own comparative analysis of other books they read in the future that deal with subject matter in common. This is most helpful and appreciated.

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Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives Paperback – August 18, 1997

• Print length 640 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Anchor
• Publication date August 18, 1997
• Dimensions 5.24 x 1.27 x 7.99 inches
• ISBN-10 0385479549
• ISBN-13 978-0385479547
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As he did in The Last Tsar , Radzinsky thrillingly brings the past to life. The Kremlin intrigues, the ceaseless round of double-dealing and back-stabbing, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class-all become, in Radzinsky's hands, as gripping and powerful as the great Russian sagas. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might--and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history--is solved.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; 0 edition (August 18, 1997)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385479549
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385479547
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.24 x 1.27 x 7.99 inches
• #216 in Historical Russia Biographies
• #1,120 in Russian History (Books)
• #2,620 in Political Leader Biographies

About the author

Edvard radzinskii.

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Customers find the book an excellent read with well-written content. They also say the content is very information packed, but some find it plodding and wordy. Opinions are mixed on the historical content, with some finding it good and others finding gross distortions of facts.

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"...It is fascinating and enlightening and remarkable to see just how close we came to Armageddon and the Apocalypse...." Read more

"This book is very, very, very interesting . A must read for any person interested in historical politics...." Read more

"...It started out pretty good as to his rise to power then became a multiple character episode, that bounced around in dates of time, which I found..." Read more

"...Even if written with amazing style, literary superb , the profussion of facts, names, dates and documented sources, all make of Radzinsky's work a..." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book well-written and informative. They also say it's best to read with an e reader, as there are many Russian words.

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"...This book is very well written , with the reader in mind, as a rolling, detailed account of the life, from birth to death, of a man born into poor,..." Read more

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"...The author does an great job of revealing just how extraordinarily monsterous , ruthless, and incredibly farsighted, Joseph Stalin really was...." Read more

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• Atomic Heritage Foundation - Joseph Stalin
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A politician to the marrow of his bones, Stalin had little private or family life, finding his main relaxation in impromptu buffet suppers, to which he would invite high party officials, generals, visiting foreign potentates, and the like. Drinking little himself on these occasions, the dictator would encourage excessive indulgence in others, thus revealing weak points that he could exploit. He would also tease his guests, jocularity and malice being nicely balanced in his manner; for such bluff banter Stalin’s main henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov , the stuttering foreign minister, was often a target. Stalin had a keen, ironical sense of humour, usually devoted to deflating his guests rather than to amusing them.

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Foremost among Stalin’s accomplishments was the industrialization of a country which, when he assumed complete control in 1928, was still notably backward by comparison with the leading industrial nations of the world. By 1937, after less than a decade’s rule as totalitarian dictator, he had increased the Soviet Union’s total industrial output to the point where it was surpassed only by that of the United States . The extent of this achievement may best be appreciated if one remembers that Russia had held only fifth place for overall industrial output in 1913, and that it thereafter suffered many years of even greater devastation—through world war , civil war, famine , and pestilence—than afflicted any of the world’s other chief industrial countries during the same period. Yet more appallingly ravaged during World War II , the Soviet Union was nevertheless able, under Stalin’s leadership, to play a major part in defeating Hitler while maintaining its position as the world’s second most powerful industrial—and now military—complex after the United States. In 1949 Stalinist Russia signaled its arrival as the world’s second nuclear power by exploding an atomic bomb .

Against these formidable achievements must be set one major disadvantage. Though a high industrial output was indeed achieved under Stalin, very little of it ever became available to the ordinary Soviet citizen in the form of consumer goods or amenities of life. A considerable proportion of the national wealth—a proportion wholly unparalleled in the history of any peacetime capitalist country—was appropriated by the state to cover military expenditure, the police apparatus, and further industrialization . It is also arguable that a comparable degree of industrialization would have come about in any case—and surely by means less savage—under almost any conceivable regime that might have evolved as an alternative to Stalinism .

Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture did not produce positive economic results remotely comparable to those attained by Soviet industry. Considered as a means of asserting control over the politically recalcitrant peasantry , however, collectivization justified itself and continued to do so for decades, remaining one of the dictator’s most durable achievements. Moreover, the process of intensive urbanization, as instituted by Stalin, continued after his death in what still remained a population more predominantly rural than that of any other major industrial country. In 1937, 56 percent of the population was recorded as engaged in agriculture or forestry ; by 1958 that proportion had dropped to 42 percent, very largely as a result of Stalin’s policies.

Another of the dictator’s achievements was the creation of his elaborately bureaucratized administrative machinery based on the interlinking of the Communist Party, ministries, legislative bodies, trade unions, political police, and armed forces, and also on a host of other meshing control devices. During the decades following the dictator’s death, these continued to supply the essential management levers of Soviet society, often remaining under the control of individuals who had risen to prominence during the years of the Stalinist terror. But the element of total personal dictatorship did not survive Stalin in its most extreme form. One result of his death was the resurgence of the Communist Party as the primary centre of power, after years during which that organization, along with all other Soviet institutions, had been subordinated to a single man’s whim. Yet, despite the great power wielded by Stalin’s successors as party leaders, they became no more than dominant figures within the framework of a ruling oligarchy . They did not develop into potentates responsible to themselves alone, such as Stalin was during his quarter of a century’s virtually unchallenged rule.

That Stalin’s system persisted as long as it did, in all its major essentials, after the death of its creator is partly due to the very excess of severity practiced by the great tyrant. Not only did his methods crush initiative among Soviet administrators, physically destroying many, but they also left a legacy of remembered fear so extreme as to render continuing post-Stalin restrictions tolerable to the population; the people would have more bitterly resented—might even, perhaps, have rejected—such rigours, had it not been for their vivid recollection of repressions immeasurably harsher. Just as Hitler’s wartime cruelty toward the Soviet population turned Stalin into a genuine national hero—making him the Soviet Union’s champion against an alien terror even worse than his own—so too Stalin’s successors owed the stability of their system in part to the comparison, still fresh in many minds, with the far worse conditions that obtained during the despot’s sway .

Stalin has arguably made a greater impact on the lives of more individuals than any other figure in history. But the evaluation of his overall achievement still remains, decades after his death, a highly controversial matter. Historians have not yet reached any definitive consensus on the worth of his accomplishments, and it is unlikely that they ever will. To the American scholar George F. Kennan , Stalin is a great man, but one great in his “incredible criminality…a criminality effectively without limits,” while Robert C. Tucker, an American specialist on Soviet affairs, has described Stalin as a 20th-century Ivan the Terrible . To the British historian E.H. Carr , the Georgian dictator appears as a ruthless, vigorous figure, but one lacking in originality—a comparative nonentity thrust into greatness by the inexorable march of the great revolution that he found himself leading. To the late Isaac Deutscher, the author of biographies of Trotsky and Stalin—who, like Carr, broadly accepts Trotsky ’s version of Stalin as a somewhat mediocre personage—Stalin represents a lamentably deviant element in the evolution of Marxism . Neither Deutscher nor Carr has found Stalin’s truly appalling record sufficiently impressive to raise doubts about the ultimate value of the Russian October Revolution’s historic achievements.

To such views may be added the suggestion that Stalin was anything but a plodding mediocrity, being rather a man of superlative, all-transcending talent. His special brilliance was, however, narrowly specialized and confined within the single crucial area of creative political manipulation, where he remains unsurpassed. Stalin was the first to recognize the potential of bureaucratic power, while the other Bolshevik leaders still feared their revolution being betrayed by a military man. Stalin’s political ability went beyond tactics, as he was able to channel massive social forces both to meet his economic goals and to expand his personal power.

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Anthony Bourdain (file Photo by Rich Fury/Invision/AP)

I recently listed some of my favorite history books of all-time and because people are the most interesting aspects of history, I included a few great biographies of significant historical figures like Malcolm X, Winston Churchill, Julius Caesar, and others.

But there are so many others Here are some of the best biographies of all time, many of which are written to inspire you to take risks in business—and in life.

The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy by Charles R. Morris 

The Tycoons by Charles R. Morris

What powered American industry, from the devastating aftermath of its civil war, to become the catalyst behind the world largest economy within decades? The answer has much to do with four men: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan. These industrialists, financiers, railroaders and oil tycoons became as big and wealthy as America itself, and along the way paved the road for what is today the laws, regulations and infrastructure of our modern markets. I enjoyed this book as not just a biography of these four men, but as an economic history of the United States during one of its most tumultuous eras.

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War and Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey by Nigel Hamilton

War and Peace by Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton's acclaimed trilogy (which is available as a three-part boxed set ) ends with this volume that happened coincide with the 75th Anniversary of D-Day. This book makes me think of perhaps my favorite presidential biography of all time:  Truman   by David McCullough. While many under-appreciated Truman during his term in office, today's readers of McCullough's 1992 biography will truly understand how he capably overcame the enormity of the challenges he faced and the impact his leadership has on our society today. But as Hamilton's FDR trilogy makes clear, many of Truman's successes (and failures) or due to what he inherited from Roosevelt.

Mozart: A Life by Peter Gay

Mozart by Peter Gay

Is it possible to summarize the life of the world's arguably greatest composer in just 160 pages? Peter Gay, a historian and previous National Book Award winner, pulls it off expertly, with a quick, engaging and informative narrative that not only digs into the nature and personality of the musical genius but also gives a great background of the economic and political times that influenced his life and his work. Gay 1999 biography takes pains to debunk some of the myths surrounding Mozart's life (no, he wasn't poisoned by a rival composer and, no, he wasn't buried in a pauper's grave).  This book isn't a deep dive or an expanded narrative. But for me, it provided all the information I wanted to learn about a musician whose works have helped me navigate my way through the mundane work—I am an accountant, after all—of my professional life.

Anthony Bourdain Remembered  by CNN

Anthony Bourdain Remembered

I've been interested in Anthony Bourdain—who tragically took his own life in 2018—long before he became a nationally known TV star of the hit CNN series "Parts Unknown." I didn't love reading   Kitchen Confidential — his first and most famous book—simply because of all the crazy stories of drug use and partying that went on behind the scenes at the restaurants where he worked. I enjoyed it because I like to go to restaurants and I'm curious—from a business and creative standpoint—about how they work. But it's Bourdain's legacy that's considered in   Anthony Bourdain Remembered , a bestseller released just last month compiling memories and anecdotes from his fans, friends, and colleagues at CNN.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore 

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Montefiore's 2003 biography of Stalin is about a man who lived with death every single day of his life to become the leader of millions and an infamous reminder of what can happen when the wrong leaders rise to power. But as the book explains—in great and sometimes gory detail—he achieved that power through many murderous and violent ways. More interestingly, Montefiore provides countless examples of how Stalin befriended his fellow politicians, party members and others only to abandon (and oftentimes eliminate them) in pursuit of his goals. Can a ruthless monster rise to the top and stay there his entire life? This book shows how it's possible.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow 

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

With all due respect to the hit musical—which is fantastic—the book it's based on is better.  That's because Ron Chernow's 2004 biography more deeply describes Hamilton's days as a soldier under Washington's command and the complexities involved in financing a young nation's growth and creating a central bank amidst the monumental political and financial challenges of the day. Hamilton—the nation’s most famous immigrant to some—never held elected office. But his influence on our lives today is still very much apparent.

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro 

The Passage of Power by Robert Caro

Robert Caro's latest entry in his series of LBJ biographies (there were three previous volumes) covers from approximately 1958 to 1964 and explains in great detail how Johnson—the powerful leader of the Senate who so aspired to the presidency —rose out of the political wilderness of the vice-presidency to use the skills he learned in over 30 years of government service to rescue the country from a devastating presidential assassination and guide it back to stability.

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson 

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson—the former editor of Time , best known for his other great biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs—not only illuminates some of da Vinci's greatest artistic works, but also reveals the genius behind this self-taught, self-confident entrepreneur. Leonardo was constantly promoting his artistic abilities to wealthy benefactors and had the creativity to come up with flying machines and giant crossbows while studying anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. Few geniuses like this have ever walked the earth.

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Looking for best biography on Stalin?

I'm finishing up reading Gulag: A history, and I'm very interested in reading more about Stalin and to a lesser extent Lenin and Trotsky. Are there any books and/or biographies that are a must read? Or just any highly recommended, comprehensive books?

Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated!!

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