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Stalin Paperback – 16 April 2010

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• ISBN-10 0330518372
• ISBN-13 978-0330518376
• Edition A Biography
• Publisher Pan
• Publication date 16 April 2010
• Language English
• Dimensions 13 x 4.6 x 19.7 cm
• Print length 736 pages
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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pan; A Biography edition (16 April 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330518372
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330518376
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 498 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 4.6 x 19.7 cm
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India
• #435 in United States History (Books)
• #500 in Political Structure & Processes
• #628 in European History (Books)

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Robert service.

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• biography & autobiography

New Biography of a Dictator

by Oleg Khlevniuk

Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

432 Pages , 6.12 x 9.25 in , 21 b-w illus.

• 9780300219784
• Published: Wednesday, 20 Sep 2017

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Oleg V. Khlevniuk is a leading research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences and senior research fellow at the State Archive of the Russian Federation. His previous Yale books include The History of the Gulag, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle , and several collections of Stalin's correspondence.

"[A] beautifully constructed, lucid, and brief new life of the dictator. . . . Written with fluent sobriety and humour the book is a constant pleasure to read. No book of history is ever definitive: new facts trickle out, new writers bring new perspectives to bear. This is the charm of the genre. But some history books can become classics for later generations. Khlevniuk’s Stalin is likely to be one of them."—Rodric Braithwaite, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies "A very digestible biography, yet one packed with revelations. . . . If you read just one biography this year, make it this one."—Paul E. Richardson, Russian Life "Superb . . . deeply informed and utterly compelling . . . What [Khlevniuk] highlights is so frequently new and revealing that the portrait in the end seems more accurate and complete than anything before. Favorov’s masterful translation from the Russian preserves the book’s spare, penetrating prose."—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs "By the amount and quality of information presented, [ Stalin: New Biography ] surpasses all other biographies on Stalin previously published inside or outside Russia."—Alexander Gogun,  Journal of Slavic Military Studies "The book is attractively organized and presented. . . . This is a brisk, exciting and compelling read."—J. Arch Getty, Slavic Review Won the 2016 PROSE Award in Biography & Autobiography. The Prose Awards recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing. Presented by the Professional Schoarly Publishing (PSP) Dision of the Associaton of American Publishers (AAP) Awarded second prize for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize for the Best Russian book in translation "Oleg Khlevniuk is incontestably the best Russian student of Soviet history. In this biography, he uses his experience and talents to give us an innovative and convincing portrait of the Soviet 'micromanaging' despot. The chapters dealing with the Terror, war, victory and the tragic postwar years break new ground. Stalin’s political and private life, his relationships with his immediate circle, his family and the 'Soviet people,' his intellectual capacities and his way of leading the country, as well as his cruelty and the system of power he built, come vividly to life, and one leaves the book with a much more profound understanding of some of Europe’s darkest decades."—Andrea Graziosi, author of the Histoire de l'URSS "Oleg Khlevniuk, master of the Russian archives, provides a fresh and acute analysis of Stalin the destroyer to confound revisionists who portray him as a state builder and modernizer."—Alfred J. Rieber, author of  Stalin and the Struggle for Eurasia "Khlevniuk is one of the most knowledgeable historians of Stalin and his era. This excellent biography of Stalin represents the current state of scholarship, and should be read widely."—Hiroaki Kuromiya, author of Stalin: Profiles in Power "A superb account by the eminent scholar who pioneered the opening of the Soviet archives. Oleg Khlevniuk summarizes a lifetime of research, eschewing unsubstantiated anecdotes and tales and sticking to the documentary record, to produce an authoritative narrative of Stalin’s life and times."—Paul Gregory, Hoover Institution "No one in the world knows the inner workings of Soviet power in Stalin’s time better than Oleg Khlevniuk. Beautifully and artfully composed, deeply moral, and supremely readable, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator will become the benchmark against which all future biographies of Stalin will be measured. A masterpiece."—Jan Plamper, author of The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power

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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.

• Ronald Grigor Suny

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Stalin: Passage to Revolution

A spellbinding new biography of Stalin in his formative years

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This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century’s most ruthless dictators. In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin’s career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin’s early years in the Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged with some of the most incendiary debates of his time. A landmark achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.

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ISBN 9780674022584

Publication date: 10/31/2006

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Overthrowing the conventional image of Stalin as an uneducated political administrator inexplicably transformed into a pathological killer, Robert Service reveals a more complex and fascinating story behind this notorious twentieth-century figure. Drawing on unexplored archives and personal testimonies gathered from across Russia and Georgia, this is the first full-scale biography of the Soviet dictator in twenty years.

Service describes in unprecedented detail the first half of Stalin's life--his childhood in Georgia as the son of a violent, drunkard father and a devoted mother; his education and religious training; and his political activity as a young revolutionary. No mere messenger for Lenin, Stalin was a prominent activist long before the Russian Revolution. Equally compelling is the depiction of Stalin as Soviet leader. Service recasts the image of Stalin as unimpeded despot; his control was not limitless. And his conviction that enemies surrounded him was not entirely unfounded.

Stalin was not just a vengeful dictator but also a man fascinated by ideas and a voracious reader of Marxist doctrine and Russian and Georgian literature as well as an internationalist committed to seeing Russia assume a powerful role on the world stage. In examining the multidimensional legacy of Stalin, Service helps explain why later would-be reformers--such as Khrushchev and Gorbachev--found the Stalinist legacy surprisingly hard to dislodge.

Rather than diminishing the horrors of Stalinism, this is an account all the more disturbing for presenting a believable human portrait. Service's lifetime engagement with Soviet Russia has resulted in the most comprehensive and compelling portrayal of Stalin to date.

Here is a life-and-times biography in the grand style: deeply researched, well written, brimming with interpretations. Oxford historian Service, author of an acclaimed biography of Lenin, provides the most complete portrait available of the Soviet ruler, from his early, troubled years in a small town in Georgia to the pinnacle of power in the Kremlin. Most previous biographers have depicted Stalin as a plodding figure whose only distinguishing characteristic was brutality. But Service describes a man who was intelligent and hardworking, who learned from experience and who played an important role in the Russian revolutionary movement...By providing such a rich and complex portrait of the dictator and the Soviet system, Service humanizes Stalin without ever diminishing the extent of the atrocities he unleashed upon the Soviet population. —Publishers Weekly

For an understanding of Stalin the man, the leader, the Georgian, the Russian nationalist, the revolutionary, the party politician, the mass murderer and the international statesman, and his place in modern Russian history--Robert Service's book is unsurpassed. —Harold Shukman, author of Stalin's Generals

[A] profound and readable assessment of the Soviet dictator…. Service paints a picture of a ruthless man absorbed in the pursuit of politics, widely read, perceptive, cunning and, despite a self-effacing and isolated persona, the stuff of leadership. —Richard Overy, The Mail on Sunday

Service revises every dimension of this multidimensional titan. His book emphasizes the importance of Marxist ideology, economics and Bolshevik culture. But it also rightly presents a human Stalin ... Gritty and unshowy, but enlightened by Service's compelling characterization, magisterial analysis and dry wit, this outstanding biography of lightly worn authority, wide research and superb intuition will be read for decades. —Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Robert Service's brilliant biography of Stalin is a major work: the fruit of long research, profound insight and understanding of his subject. It offers a truly rounded and thoroughly readable portrait of this monstrous figure. —Andrew Roberts, Daily Telegraph

This is effectively the first full biography since perestroika to encompass the economic, political, diplomatic, military, administrative and, above all, ideological dimensions, as well as the personal aspects of Stalin's colossal life. Gritty and unshowy, but enlightened by Service's compelling characterisation, magisterial analysis and dry wit, this outstanding biography of lightly worn authority, wide research and superb intuition will be read for decades. —Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Times

A profound and readable reassessment of the Soviet dictator...Service paints a picture of a ruthless man absorbed in the pursuit of politics, widely read, perceptive, cunning and, despite a self-effacing and isolated persona, the stuff of leadership...Stalin was no fool; he could scarcely have become dictator of a vast nation if he had been. Yet his contemporaries, and many historians since, have underestimated him. Service makes sense of Stalin's achievements by making us take him seriously...Stalin's power at its peak was immense and daunting. Service reminds us that a quarter of Russians recently polled put the Stalin years top of the list of periods in Russian history they most admired...This shrewd biography helps us understand clearly and dispassionately why not everyone remembers Stalin as a murderous ogre. —Richard Overy, The Mail on Sunday

Service triumphs in portraying Stalin's personality in the context of his times...This book is a tour de force. Not only does Service trace Stalin's road to dictatorship, he shows us what he did with absolute power...No one has shown in more convincing detail than Service Stalin's evolution to the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. It is, above all, a balanced account. He has the courage to confess that the monster, in his shabby clothes and wornout boots, dying alone in his dacha, soaked in his own urine, remains for him an enigma, not least because of the tyrant's consistent massaging of his own image. —Raymond Carr, The Spectator

In his new biography of the Soviet dictator, Robert Service has given the most convincing description yet of how Stalin's insecure Georgian childhood fashioned his psychology. At key points in the book, we are reminded of Stalin's duality--on the one hand he was a proud Caucasian toughie who organized bank robberies and could drink spirits all night. On the other, he was a man who aspired to understand and interpret (crassly) high art and politics...This is the first serious political biography of Stalin since the opening of the archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1990s and Service has made good use of them. —Misha Glenny, Irish Times

In Service's eyes, Stalin remains ruthless, cunning and murderous. But a richer and more complex individual emerges--and a more human one. Stalin is shown as lover, husband and father. A man who wrote poetry and loved singing. A serious communist political thinker and the best-read Russian leader since Catherine the Great...[Service] has written a masterly book, with great erudition, style and wit. Although there are still some Soviet-era archives that remain closed, this biography will surely stand the test of time. —Stefan Wagstyl, Financial Times

In the course of this engrossing and well-researched book, Stalin emerges as a fascinating, complex figure. —Andrew Roberts, Daily Telegraph

A common perception of Stalin is that of an oafish backroom bureaucrat who bludgeoned his way to the heights of power. But this image does not do justice to the multi-faceted and fascinating person who emerges in this latest biography. Drawing on fresh archive material, historian Robert Service lays the man bare and places him within the context of his times. He paints a picture of a talented politician who was driven by a severe personality disorder to behave in the way he did...Humanising him, Service believes, will help to identify future tyrants. Here he has struck the right balance and produced an intellectually cogent and highly readable account. —Gavin Engelbrecht, Northern Echo

Service has written an unhurried, richly detailed and rigorously researched book, anchored in hundreds of sources--a vast but cleanly structured text, polished, fluent and brisk...Service gives us a portrait of a paranoid and murderous despot, not a one-dimensional, cartoonish baddie...Service greatly advances our understanding by deftly fusing the tale of the man with that of the doctrine to which he was fanatically beholden and the ethos and practices of the tiny underground party. —Leon Aron, Washington Post

Service's fascinating new Stalin biography, the first comprehensive English-language treatment of his life since the opening of the Soviet archives in the mid-1990s, is full of historical what-ifs... Stalin: A Biography ...is a major landmark in the recent scholarly reassessment of the notorious dictator who consolidated Soviet power, launched vicious purges against his own people (and indeed his own political party), defeated the Nazis in World War II, and launched the Cold War...Service's trumps all other volumes now available on Stalin's life. It synthesizes all the major narrative accounts and incorporates a good deal of revealing new information. —Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

Service's biography is full-scale, eking out the details of Stalin's childhood and education (including his nearly complete seminary instruction)...Service has used material newly released from Soviet archives to understand Stalin during the Bolshevik revolution, showing how he learned butchery from Lenin and struggled to survive as Lenin's successor. Service's biography is...readable and accessible. —Harry Willems, Library Journal

Stalin: A Biography ...offers the most detailed account of his life, career and beliefs. —Andrew Nagorski, Newsweek

[An] excellent new biography...Robert Service paints a picture of a warped monster of a man, insatiable in his pursuit of power, ruthless in his treatment of real and imagined rivals, remorseless in his murder of millions. Service's innovation is to reveal Stalin's frailty--above all, his capacity for miscalculation. He made no blunder costlier than that of June 1941; yet he himself got off scot-free. —Niall Ferguson, New York Times Book Review

A stimulating study of a monster whose thoughts and motives remain obscure. It also serves as a reminder that unbridled power is usually a recipe for disaster. —Lynwood Abram, Houston Chronicle

This will likely serve for a long time as the most authoritative and comprehensive one-volume study of Stalin...Service portrays Stalin as an intellectual of sorts who read widely, although always within the wobbling worldview of Marxist-Leninism and with an eye to the usefulness of ideas in expanding and maintaining his own power... Stalin: A Biography , with its low-key, frequently wry, and exhaustively researched telling of the story, will be a standard reference for years to come. —First Things

Stalin made little distinction between his personal and political life, and as Service demonstrates in this balanced, tightly written work, it is necessary to consider each in the context of the other. Never abandoning his wide-angle lens, Service shows how Stalin's experiences of religion, nationalism, peasant lore, and imperialism became the channels through which he funneled his radical agenda...Keenly aware that by putting a human face on the monster he is exposing himself to charges of being an apologist, Service nevertheless perseveres in setting the record straight in this comprehensive and landmark biography...By painstakingly deconstructing Stalin's personal reinventions and self-created legacy, Service takes an important step toward revealing the man behind the myth. The more the tyrant is exposed for who he was, the harder it will become to wax nostalgic for his times. —Rebecca Reich, New Leader

Stalin , a sequel to Mr. Service's Lenin: A Biography , presents a richly documented, highly persuasive portrait of the man who transformed the Soviet Union into a modem military-industrial power, terrorized millions and ruled over an empire that would have been the envy of the czars...Brick by brick, Mr. Service constructs a solid, accessible work that does as much as one book can to explain Stalin as a human being, and as the architect of a system that still weighs heavy on millions of citizens in the former Soviet Union. —William Grimes, New York Times

A striking example of what solidly researched historiography with an appeal for a wider readership might look like. Erudite yet never abstruse, comprehensive and gripping at the same time, Stalin: A Biography should become required reading for students, specialists, and anyone else interested in modern history. —Australian Slavonic and East European Studies

Service’s impressive biography successfully challenges the conventional image of Stalin...Service has a remarkable talent for covering a lot of ground with clarity, brevity, and nuance. His portrait of Stalin is highly contextualized, and he balances his analysis of Stalin with a broader discussion of the historical events that the dictator both influenced and experienced. —Golfo Alexopoulos, Journal of Cold War Studies

[Service’s] biography of Stalin is the first in English touching on every aspect of the dictator’s life, using resources made available since the perestroyka era and the subsequent break-up of the USSR...This book, over its 715-plus pages, reveals a definite, even definitive, mastery of its topic...The insights seem fresh and original, helped by the author’s trenchant style, his robust, short sentences...[M]ore than any other biographer, Service shows the human—indeed inhuman—figure at the centre of all this activity and his daily routine in his rise to the power of life and death over everyone in the USSR. Underpinning this is the author’s broad thesis that the personal and political in Stalin were so intermingled, as to be indistinguishable—more so than with any other tyrant...[A]ny criticism of a scholar who has scaled the mountain that is Stalin’s life, with such dedication and mastery, cannot be very substantial. The author’s very achievement casts a huge shadow—benign in his case—over any critic. —Tony Wilson, New Zealand Slavonic Journal

• Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor of Russian History at the University of Oxford.

Book Details

• 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
• Belknap Press

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Stalin: A Biography Paperback – 16 April 2010

Drawing on a wealth of unexplored material - available for the first time since the collapse of the former Soviet Union - Robert Service's biography of Stalin is the most authoritative yet published. It concentrates not simply on Stalin as dedicated bureaucrat or serial political killer, but on a fuller assessment of his formative interactions in Georgia, his youthful revolutionary activism, his relationship with Lenin, with his family, and with his party members.

'This is effectively the first full biography since perestroika to encompass the economic, political, diplomatic, military, administrative and, above all, ideological dimensions, as well as the personal aspects of Stalin's colossal life . . . Gritty and unshowy, but enlightened by Service's compelling characterisation, magisterial analysis and dry wit, this outstanding biography of lightly worn authority, wide research and superb intuition will be read for decades'

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of STALIN: The Court of the Red Tsar Sunday Times

• Print length 736 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pan
• Publication date 16 April 2010
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 13 x 4.6 x 19.7 cm
• ISBN-10 0330518372
• ISBN-13 978-0330518376
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pan; Reprints edition (16 April 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0330518372
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0330518376
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 4.6 x 19.7 cm
• 50 in Russian Historical Biographies
• 258 in Political Leader Biographies
• 307 in Historical Biographies starting 1901

About the author

Robert service.

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Customers find the writing style very well written and appreciate the wonderful insights. They also describe the biography as excellent, entertaining, and the best Stalin biography they have read. Customers also describe it as an excellent read.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the biography peppered with wonderful insights, thorough, and informative. They also say it's a good introduction, fascinating investigation into a monster, and entertaining version of events. Customers also say the book manages to keep them engaged all the way through.

"...A great read. Informative, insightful and entertaining (as even history can and should sometimes be). Ivan the Terrible" Read more

"well written. Meticulous research ." Read more

"In this excellent biography of Stalin, Robert Service provides an informative and balanced account with a high level of readability...." Read more

"...In saying that, it's also a very enlightening and strangely entertaining version of events...." Read more

Customers find the book an excellent read and a good purchase.

"...over two weeks (I like to savor the flavor) and I must say it was a great read ...." Read more

" Pretty good , it's big and managed to keep me engaged all the way through even though I am not a historian...." Read more

" Absolute marvellous read . Totally absorbing to the point I couldn't put it down. Go somewhere quiet and dive straight in." Read more

"arrived on time, good purchase " Read more

Customers find the writing style very well written and a good read.

" well written . Meticulous research." Read more

"...Service provides an informative and balanced account with a high level of readability ...." Read more

" Well written and although the subject matter was difficult at times - the writing made you want to read on...." Read more

" This was a good read , especially in Stalins early years. It tends to move a bit to fast over the World War 2 and Cold War years...." Read more

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Edvard Radzinsky , H.T. Willetts  ( Translator )

640 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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اگر جنایت های جانیان به من آسیبی نرساند هر چند که خون هزاران نفر را ریخته باشند اگر بیماری های نوع انسان به من آسیبی نرسانند هر چند ک�� جان هزاران نفر را گرفته باشند اگر هزارن حیوان هر روزه سر بریده شوند اما خنجری مرا نشانه نرود من از هیچ یک نخواهم هراسید. و تمام آلام بشری را تا آنجا که اندوهگین و رنجور ��م نسازند اموری خواهم شمرد طبیعی و برای دیگران.

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Nonfiction Books » History Books » Russian History » Joseph Stalin

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Joseph Stalin

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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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Stalin: A Political Biography 2nd Edition

• ISBN-10 0195002733
• ISBN-13 978-0195002737
• Edition 2nd
• Publisher Oxford University Press
• Publication date December 31, 1967
• Language English
• Dimensions 5.13 x 1.39 x 8 inches
• Print length 704 pages
• See all details

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Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 2nd edition (December 31, 1967)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 704 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195002733
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195002737
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.34 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 1.39 x 8 inches
• #44,501 in Textbooks (Special Features Stores)
• #62,339 in Biographies (Books)

About the author

Isaac deutscher.

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A Portrait of Stalin in All His Murderous Contradictions

By Mark Atwood Lawrence

• Oct. 19, 2017
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STALIN Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 By Stephen Kotkin Illustrated. 1,154 pp. Penguin Press. $40.

Dictators lend themselves to caricature. We label them sociopaths, paranoiacs or just victims of bad childhoods. We flatten them in order to explain our own times. Saddam Hussein is Hitler; Vladimir Putin is Peter the Great; Donald Trump is Mussolini . Sometimes, we are told, they simply defy explanation. In a 1939 radio address, Winston Churchill conceded defeat in his efforts to understand Stalin’s Soviet Union. “It is,” Churchill said, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Stephen Kotkin demolishes such simplicities in his monumental “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second part of a projected three-volume biography of the Soviet leader whose reign of cruelty stretched from the mid-1920s to his death in 1953. Drawing on an astonishing array of sources, Kotkin paints a richly variegated portrait, delving into Stalin’s peculiar personality even while situating him within the trajectories of Soviet history and totalitarianism more generally.

This multilayered analysis has a downside: The densely packed, 1,154-page tome — roughly a page for every four days of the period it covers — is no easy read. Yet the book unquestionably rewards the patience that it demands. Slowly but inexorably, Kotkin teases out his subject’s contradictions, revealing Stalin as both ideologue and opportunist, man of iron will and creature of the Soviet system, creep who apparently drove his wife to suicide and leader who inspired his people.

And a compelling central thread holds it all together: Stalin’s unwavering determination to transform his country into a fully Communist nation capable of holding its own in a world of hostile powers. “Stalin did what acclaimed leaders do,” Kotkin writes. “He articulated and drove toward a consistent goal, in his case a powerful state backed by a unified society that eradicated capitalism and built industrial socialism.”

An eminent scholar of Soviet history at Princeton University, Kotkin picks up where he left off in V olume 1 — the eve of Stalin’s 1929 decision to collectivize Soviet agriculture — and carries his story down to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 21, 1941. The narrative moves forward, though, in three distinct stages that highlight different facets of Stalin’s rule.

The first section focuses on the Communist Party’s drive to abolish private landholding in the Soviet countryside from 1929 into the early 1930s. Aiming to feed a growing urban work force and increase exports, Stalin’s henchmen forced peasants onto collective farms and eliminated relatively well-off peasants known as kulaks. The human consequences were, in Kotkin’s word, nothing short of an “apocalypse.” Famine resulting from social upheaval and drought killed between five million and seven million people, while five million kulaks were arrested, deported or murdered.

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