ANYONE UNFAMILIAR with the quality of Stephen Kotkin’s four earlier books on the Soviet Union might well question whether we need a new, voluminous tome about the first fifty years of Joseph Stalin’s life. Stalin, like Hitler, has been the subject of numerous biographies, ranging from Boris Souvarine’s pioneering work to Robert C. Tucker’s multivolume study. Is there anything important to add?
The answer is an emphatic yes, and not just because Kotkin’s Stalin is the product of a careful review of how a tyrant gained control of a country and exercised power. It dispenses with the myth that he was an intellectual dullard, showing that he was quite shrewd as well as forceful. What’s more, it contains essential background information for policy makers in the world today, illuminating some of the causes of the strife that persists despite the end of the Cold War.
In order to explain Stalin, Kotkin (a former valued colleague of mine at Princeton University) provides a brilliant political history of Russia in the early twentieth century. By casting his research net widely and examining evidence that has only recently become available as a result of the opening of Soviet archives, he illustrates the complexity of motives and fundamental unpredictability of events as they unfolded during the 1920s.
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