Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator

Amazon.com Price: $19.02 (as of 10/11/2019 21:15 PST- Details)

Description

The most authoritative and engrossing biography of the notorious dictator ever written

Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. All over that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk’s estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than one million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were sufferers of famine straight away resulting from Stalin’s policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography, by the creator most deeply conversant in the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves a lot of controversies about specific events in the dictator’s life at the same time as assembling many hundreds of prior to now unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.
 
In brief, revealing prologues to every chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin’s favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin’s childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book’s conclusion, the creator presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era.
 

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Engineering and Transportation » Engineering » Reference » Atlases and Maps » World » Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator

Recent Products