Stalin biography review

Displaying 1 - 30 of reviews. Paul Bryant. There should be a guide for us poor readers of biographies. There are multiple biographies available for all famous people and the biographies differ wildly. With this guy Stalin, I have recently tried Stephen Kotkin's massive first-of-three parts page tome with its teenytiny typeface and it defeated me, there was wayyyyy too much detail for a simple soul like me - I drowned, even though Stephen has a wonderful racy style.

He knows too much and he thinks you should too! So Kotkin takes pages to tell Stalin's story up to age In great contrast Oleg Khlevniuk takes pages to tell the entire story. His organizational and writing abilities, daring, decisiveness, cool head, simple tastes, adaptability and devotion to Lenin all contributed to his elevation to the top ranks.

So, you see, hard work, talent and ambition sometimes will pay off handsomely. We are never sure what Stalin thought communism was, what the whole point of it washow long it would take to achieve; what he thought of Hitler, when he realised the Nazis were lethal, is also unknown. The Stalin in this book is a valueless paranoid who endlessly signs orders for purges, for exiles, for transportations and for executions.

He sees enemies everywhere so at some point the only purpose of his dictatorship is to maintain himself as dictator. Stalin becomes the point of the Russian revolution. Another great swathe of this book is concerned with the sterile jockeying of the top politburo cheeses for position, also value-free. Did these horrible stalin biographies review think they were benefitting the Russian people?

We must assume so, in some way, but really we have no idea. So this book leaves out too much! He should surely have mentioned that one of Hitler's main obsessions was the destruction of Bolshevism - he made no secret of it - so what did Stalin think of that? He doesn't even tell us what Stalin thought communism was for! I mean to say, if all it did was oppress the peasants, liquidate millions of innocent workers, create unintended famines by wrecking agriculture and eventually reaching a standard of living way below anything experienced in the west, what was it all for?

You have to wonder. Did Stalin think revolution was possible in the west or in other countries? The Chinese revolution occurs offstage until when suddenly it happens without any warning and without any hint of what Stalin thought about this huge event. Instead of investigating all this our author keeps us in a claustrophobic space where all we can see is the endless jockeying for position and power amongst the politburo, enlivened by the endless recurring purges.

He had no expertise whatsoever when it came to dealing with the economy and probably sincerely believed it could be forced into whatever mold politics dictated. Wikipedia gives us this definition : A state-capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts as a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production.

Indeed, the Stalinist version of communism seemed to have been the mirror image, at the level of the entire state, of the standard idea of the capitalist enterprise, in which the greedy bosses mercilessly exploit the workers, whose wages are kept as low as possible, strikes forbidden, no holidays. And all profits go to the directors who live their lives of luxury, spending their millions on vanity projects.

According to the author, this is exactly what happened in the USSR from the 30s to the 50s. The better-off ones, anyway. The working class were the industrial workers only. So it was perfectly okay, therefore, to maintain a kind of war on the greedy food-withholding peasants. Peasant property became the property of the community, right down to family chickens and personal items.

They could never figure out how to make collective farms productive; they seemed to be crippled by a universal foot-dragging fueled by a gut-level hatred of the Soviet government. If your agriculture is on its knees for 30 years your country is going to fail. There will be regular famines in various areas. The USSR could never seem to fix it. Because they had no knowledge of how to run an industrial state they made many horrible mistakes : Vast sums and resources were poured into undertaking construction that was never completed; into equipment for which no use was ever found, purchased from abroad out of Soviet gold reserves; into wasteful redesigns, the inevitable result of excessive haste; and into goods so poorly produced as to be unusable.

This is heartbreaking. Hitler rose from nothing and nowhere by the power of his charisma and rhetoric, galvanising thousands with his iron dreams of glory. The German people were in love with Hitler. He had them in a trance, listening to him spit fire for an hour, all without notes, they thought they had caught a glimpse of German heaven. He was their great leader.

But Stalin spent ten years toiling tirelessly for someone else's revolution; he slowly wormed and connived his way to the top, nothing was handed to him, he wangled and backstabbed and he also worked 25 hours a day. He hardly ever spoke in public, he was stumbling and rambling and dull. It took him another ten years after the revolution to eliminate his rivals and become supreme dictator.

Hitler's cult of personality was spontaneous and heartfelt, Stalin's was manufactured by the Party - but it's true, eventually that became a deep heartfelt thing too. Taking the reader well behind the iron curtain, Khlevniuk explores some of the many topics only briefly mentioned in passing before, if not entirely erased from stalin biography review discussion.

Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, came from a frugal household. As a young man, Jughashvili rebranded himself as Joseph Stalin, a name that rolled off the tongue with greater ease, while also finding solace in the Bolshevik Party, speaking out for a Marxist way of life. Stalin could not stomach much of the class divisions that he saw developing in his homeland, but also did not stay quiet about these issues, finding himself shipped off to Siberia on a few occasions.

As history has recounted, Lenin feared his eventual death, as it would surely see Stalin take the reins and steer the USSR in another direction. When Stalin did succeed Lenin, things took a significant change in the USSR, as the new leader sought to focus his attention on bringing to pass some of his collectivisation tactics, textbook communism wherein the country would share all.

Brutal hoarding of products brought about by Party rules saw people literally starving, with no remorse by Stalin whatsoever. Khlevniuk depicts brutal murder for those who would not abide by the rules and how some mothers, mad with starvation, turned to murdering their children to eat their flesh. Without any firm alliances on the international scene, Stalin inched towards the Nazis, who were solidifying their own power structure in Western Europe.

Not wanting to show any sign of weakness, Stalin held onto his loose non-aggression pact with Hitler, only to have the German dictator plot an invasion of Russia in secret. By the end of fighting, Khlevniuk cites that over six million Russians had died, a figure that becomes even more astonishing when added to the millions who perished during the famines and collectivisations mentioned before.

With the war over, Stalin turned to his own territorial expansions across Eastern Europe, amassing countries under his Communist umbrella. While he did that, he watched with fascination as China turned red, though its leader, Mao, would not be suppressed or bullied. Stalin may have had the role of brutal communist dictator sewed up, but Mao was surely ready to learn and did enact some of his own horrible treatment of the Chinese.

Khlevniuk examines this, both through the narrative and with extracted comments by others, as Stalin suffered a debilitating stroke while those in his inner circle could do nothing. Sentiment in the stalin biographies review was mixed, though the Secret Police and communist officials sough to quell much of the critical talk. A brilliant biographical piece that will entertain and educate many who take the time to read it.

Highly recommended for those who love political biographies, particularly of those leaders who have received such a whitewashed tale in history books. Choosing to focus on the man and add the lenses of his leadership and the ideology he espouses, the reader sees a new and definitely more brutal Stalin than has been previously substantiated. Actions are no longer part of a sterlised account and the reader is not fed tasteless narrative pablum, but able to see more of the actions and the blood flowing in the proverbial streets.

I was shocked on more than one occasion with the attention to detail provided within the piece and how these accounts received substantiation from those in the room, as though they could now speak out without worry of being persecuted. Khlevniuk is able to convey a great deal of information in his narrative, taking the reader deep into the history, but knows what will appeal to the general reader and what might be too mundane.

Interestingly enough, Khlevniuk tells the reader in his introduction that each part can be read in whatever order they choose, though anyone seeking a chronological depiction of Stalin should and would read from beginning to end in that order. There is much to learn about the man and his impact on world history, as we enter an era of new authoritarian leaders who seek to control large portions of the population.

Some writers — like Kotkin, obviously — confronted with such riches, have lost their grip on reality. Exhaustive details had to be forsaken. References and notes had to be kept to a minimum, so priority has been given to the attribution of quotes, numbers, and facts. By no means all of the worthy works of my colleagues have been mentioned, for which I offer them my apologies.

Such economies leave me ambivalent. I regret the omission of many telling facts and quotes, but I am glad for the reader. I know how it feels to gaze wistfully at stacks of fat tomes that will never be conquered. Though Stolypin possessed all the personal attributes minimally necessary to effect fundamental social transformation — determined, energetic, courageous, a visionary — Kotkin laments that no significant section of the tsarist establishment, in particular from the landed gentry, supported Stolypin in that endeavor.

Even Nicholas II, blind to his own true interests, failed to back his appointee. Certainly, Oblomovism characterized neither man. The great chronicler of the Russian Revolution N. Kotkin is right on this point. What was Deutscher doing in his book that Kotkin is not? Kotkin allots but a handful of desultory paragraphs to political argument.

His parsimony is understandable: Stalin was doing his bit to persuade and win people over to the Bolsheviks. Incredibly, Kotkin simply ignores the determining role Stalin and Kamenev did play among the Bolsheviks in the first weeks of the revolution, before Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership abroad had set foot in Russia. Unable or unwilling to account for this anomaly within his no-holds-barred anti-communist paradigm, Kotkin keeps silent.

In Marchthe opportunity to seize or attempt to seize power came — and went — without Stalin doing anything power-hungry. Something without precedent arose in the first days of the February Revolution: the formation of the Petrograd Soviet, sitting in one wing of the Tauride Palace, and that of the Provisional Government, sitting in the other.

The Soviet was rooted in the working class of the city. Democratically elected, its proceedings public, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries led it. The famous Order No. In sharp contrast, the Provisional Government came out of the unrepresentative Duma. A handful of self-appointed Kadet Party parliamentary leaders hatched it behind closed doors.

Kadet Duma liberal luminaries dominated it. The Bolsheviks on the scene pressed for the immediate formation of a Provisional Government that was truly revolutionary. They did not have in mind the Soviet as Lars Lih has held but a Provisional Government led by revolutionaries, not counter-revolutionary Kadets. It could be established, they believed, by displacing the current one, or by purging the current one of its liberals, or simply by rendering those liberals politically insignificant.

Released from exile, Stalin, soon followed by Kamenev, shrank from drawing these revolutionary, anti-Kadet government conclusions. In short, the top Bolshevik leadership in Russia renounced any attempt to organize a campaign to seize power in the name of the Soviet — let alone in its own name — not because a claque of politically impotent liberals stood in the way, but because of the idea that no proletarian-led socialist revolution was on the agenda.

Lenin arrived at the Finland Station in early April. The balance of forces in the Bolshevik rank-and-file favored Lenin. With their support, Lenin argued for, and executed, a strategic reorientation. Kotkin grossly underestimates the intelligence of the Bolsheviks, and that of the masses. Kotkin may well declare the October Revolution to have been the handiwork of a cabal of conspirators.

Stalin biography review: Customers find the book readable and

Without the support of the working class, the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War over an array of counter-revolutionary White armies, led by antisemitic cutthroats and supported by English, American, French, and Japanese imperialist freebooters, would have been inconceivable. Peace finally came in The Soviet dictatorship was now exercised by the Bolshevik Party alone, the bulk of the Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik leaderships having denied the legitimacy of the October Revolution.

Within that political monopoly, Stalin assumed an evermore prominent role. Stalin was elected general secretary in In his dictated testament, Lenin counseled removing Stalin for his rude, high-handed, and exceptionally authoritarian ways. Stalin never questioned it. In other words, even if it was partly or wholly concocted, the dictation ran true.

The chapter titled "the big three" was particularly poor in this respect, as it relied almost entirely on Churchill's memoirs which if I am not mistaken were written after both Roosevelt and Stalin were dead, thus making it a suspect source of information by itself. The book is a biography NOT a general history of Soviet Russia, and must be treated as such, however I would have liked more detail regarding the second world war which seemed very briefly dealt with.

The book goes into great detail when it comes to his youth and his earlier involvement with the Lenin's ilk. Service does away with the myth that Stalin was the unremarkable dullard and bureaucrat who's ascension could not have been predicted. Stalin was an intellectual, despite having very few original ideas of his own, and although not feared for suspicions of "Bonepartism" as Trotsky was, it would be wrong to suggest the Great Terror and other incidents of moments of brutal repression could not have been predicted in those early stages.

Stalin was ruthless from the beginning. Stalin's leadership style is also put into a new perspective. Whereas Ian Kershaw characterises Hitler as a Weberian "charismatic authority" figure in contrast with Stalin's "bureaucratic authority"; Service's analysis of Stalin makes him appear far closer to Hitler as is often imagined. This characterisation is more in line with the sociologist Ivan Szelenyi.

It is the best Stalin biography I have read so far, even if it could have been a lot longer in stalin biographies review. Christopher Saunders. Rather dry assessment of the Soviet dictator. Service's research is formidable and he provides some interesting perspectives on Stalin. He shows that Stalin was less power-hungry pragmatist than ideologue with his own ideas on Marxism.

Stalin's model of state socialism wasn't any less intellectually sound than Trotsky's airy proposition of "Permanent Revolution" - Stalin just lacked Trotsky's arrogance. Nonetheless, no reader will come away from this book thinking Stalin any less of a monster: his purges, monstrous personality and consolidation of absolute power dominate the narrative.

Stalin biography review: This comparative review examines

The main difficulty is Service's writing style, clipped yet cluttered no paragraph needs to take up half a page if every sentence is three words long. An aesthetic criticism sure, but some of us like to enjoy reading history along with learning from it. Carmen Scott. This Stalin biography is a book telling the story of how the uneducated political administrator transformed into a pathological killer, with few details excluded.

Service did an amazing job of telling the younger life of the future leading of the USSR, from his life in Georgia, his drunk dad, to his active political service. Service shows the turmoil in Oct that led him to rule over Russia in WW2, as well as contributing to the fall of Hitler. Not overshadowing the poverty, famine, and purges Stalin created through his dictatorship, until he died of a stroke, leaving behind the nation to Khrushchev and Gorbachev, who found his evil legacy was hard to scrub off the face of Russia.

Sometimes the writing can be a little dull, but it's a good book to start out with on the life of Stalin. Overall, anyone interested in Stalin's life or Russia's history would find this book trying to give them a paper cut. Have been reading on Russia for the past few weeks. This book on Stalin is a masterpiece. Robert Service one of the few historians who exclusively researches on Russia has written this comprehensive biography.

Stalin was a very complex individual. He was a monster and one of the three individuals responsible for maximum number of deaths in the world. The others being Mao and Hitler. Tour de force and a must read. Stalin: A Biography, written by Robert Service, is a book telling the story of how the uneducated political administrator transformed into a pathological stalin biography review, with few details excluded.

I believe Service did an amazing job bringing the past of this evil man in great detail, so we are able to see the destruction of change Stalin left behind, as well as eye witness testimonies to back it up. However, sometimes the writing can be a little dull, but I think this is a great book to start out with on the life of Stalin. Becky J. I struggled stalin biography review the writing style in places the writing is kind of odd, somehow choppy.

It's almost like it had been translated from another language, which as far as I can tell it hasn't and got annoyed with the author in other places 'Was Stalin an anti-Semite? Definitely no. Well, kind of. A little bit. If you want to know about Stalin, this is a great book to read, but the experience of reading it may not be great. I can't compare with other works on Stalin since I haven't read them yet, but I'm planning on getting to Simon Sebag Montefiore eventually.

Stalin for good or for bad was a colossus of the 20th Century. Deutsher writes this essentially political biography, with what I think is the insight of a former believer but without the bitterness or rancour that is often the case. It is by far the best biography of Stalin. Derek Bridge. The sub-title makes it clear that this book is not about Stalin, the man.

This makes it quite dry. And its vintage the bulk of it written in means that there is much that has come to light subsequently of which it is unaware. On the other hand, Deutscher has an almost journalistic familiarity with the events that younger historians cannot tap into. I found it hard-going but worth reading. Isaac Deutscher is one of my favorite historians, and his trilogy on the life of Trotsky is an incredible set of books.

This biography of Stalin did less for me, though it is still insightful. Incredibly readable, rich and thorough overview of Stalin's political life. Some conclusions may be outdated now but otherwise a very good read. Terry Cook. What is it About? Unsurprising it is about Joseph Stalin, which is probably the least helpful start to a review ever!

A man who makes up his own birth date is one who wants to control everything about his life irrespective of facts. Service attempts to get beneath the official Stalin and get to the real person, in this, he very much succeeds. He is helped by the newly released archive materials that reveal much of Stalin and his time from official and personal correspondence from himself and those around him.

Those that have some knowledge be prepared to be surprised; this book will dispel many myths. Previous accounts were either supplied by the Soviet state or from his enemies, such as Trotsky, who were outside of the state.

Stalin biography review: The second volume of

Neither of which are without their agendas. With the opening of the Soviet archives, Service and others, have been able to research the real Stalin from his own and contemporaries letters, memos, meeting minutes, notes in margins of reports, and personal diaries not seen before. One other thing you need to be aware of is Russian names! They are a pain!

Anyone who has touched on any Russian literature will know that an individual can have five or more legitimate different names. Add to this the habit of the revolutionaries of using nicknames and the fact that, to western ears, the names are so alien and you have a recipe for confusion. For example, Stalin is not his real name Joseph Djugashvili, his real name, was also commonly known as Koba and Soso.