Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by O. V. Khlevni︠u︡k (PDF)

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An engrossing biography of the notorious Russian dictator by an author whose knowledge of Soviet-era archives far surpasses all others.Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk’s estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin’s policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator’s life while assembling many hundreds of previously 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 each 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 author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era. “This brilliant, authoritative, opinionated biography ranks as the best on Stalin in any language.”—Martin McCauley East-West Review“A historiographical and literary masterpiece.”—Mark Edele, Australian Book Review“A very digestible biography, yet one packed with revelations.”—Paul E. Richardson, Russian Life Magazine

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, Robert Service, Stephen Kotkin, Robert Conquest, and Simon Sebag Montefiore have all produced widely-read accounts of Joseph Stalin’s life. They’re among scores of others. In fact, Amazon dredges up more than 1,000 titles in response to the query “Stalin biography.” Why, then, is yet a new biography of the man necessary? The Russian historian who wrote it explains that “in today’s Russia . . . Stalin’s image is primarily being shaped by pseudo-scholarly apologias.”Rejecting an “alternative” StalinThis “large-scale poisoning of minds with myths of an ‘alternative’ Stalin” prompted him to write his sixth book on the man. And Oleg Khlevniuk may well be the world’s leading expert on Joseph Stalin, having dedicated more than two decades to studying his life. His “new biography,” published in 2015, benefits from the opening of Soviet archives and his own seemingly obsessive pursuit of other original sources. While the book is not an easy read, it may be as close to an authoritative and well-balanced picture of the man who ruled the USSR as a dictator from 1928 to his death in 1953.The harsh reality of Stalin’s ruleTo the West, Joseph Stalin was a monster who was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Khlevniuk does not shy away from this reality. “Official records show,” he writes, “that approximately eight hundred thousand people were shot [on Stalin’s orders] between 1930 and 1952.” But that number only hints at the wider truth. “Between 1930 and 1952, some 20 million people were sentenced to incarceration in labor camps, penal colonies, or prisons. During that same period no fewer than 6 million, primarily ‘kulaks‘ and members of ‘oppressed peoples,’ were subjected to . . . forced resettlement to a remote area of the USSR. “On average, over the more than twenty-year span of Stalin’s rule, 1 million people were shot, incarcerated, or deported to barely habitable areas of the Soviet Union every year.”And these numbers don’t include the seven to ten million people who died in the Great Famine in Ukraine—or the twenty-seven million people who lost their lives in the country in World War II, many of them needlessly as a result of blunders by Stalin.The death of Stalin is a linchpin for the storyAt its core, Khlevniuk’s Stalin is a conventional political biography, chronologically ordered. But its six chapters alternate with interludes that use Stalin’s death and the events surrounding it as a device to explore the dictator’s family life and the way he conducted himself on a daily basis. The book opens on the evening of February 28, 1953, at Stalin’s home near Moscow. The five men who govern the Soviet Union—ostensibly as a collective known as “the Five”—are at dinner. As the author explains how Stalin relates to them, we learn how terrified all four of the others are. But this is the last time they will meet for dinner.After they leave, sometime in the early hours of the morning of March 1, the seventy-four-year-old Stalin suffers a devastating stroke that leaves him immobile and alone. Subsequent interludes reveal how he lay dying for hours, with everyone in his entourage afraid to intrude. It’s a brutally effective portrayal. And Khlevniuk’s account proceeds to relate the great speed with which the men around Stalin moved to undo many of the harsh and counterproductive policies he’d pursued.Nearly four decades to rise to unchallenged controlIn the main body of the book’s text, Khlevniuk describes—sometimes in mind-numbing details—Stalin’s twenty-year rise to a position as “one of Lenin’s closest associates” and the power politics that consumed the Soviet leadership for years after Lenin’s death in 1924. Most accounts of Soviet history report that Stalin had clawed his way to unchallenged command of the Party and the government by 1928. But the author suggests that time didn’t arrive until 1937. The Great Purge (or Red Terror) eliminated any hint of potential opposition as Stalin methodically murdered his Bolshevik colleagues, one after another, only to replace them with younger men who were beholden only to him.That shift to inexperienced and sometimes incompetent men sorely tested Stalin’s ability to respond once Nazi Germany attacked in July 1941. Khlevniuk’s account explains in great detail in his depiction of the disbelief, shock, and inaction with which Stalin and his close associates greeted the arrival of the invading German armies. He writes, “There is no serious basis for revising the traditional view that Stalin was fatally indecisive and even befuddled in the face of the growing Nazi threat.”A balanced portrayal of Stalin’s lifeMost accounts of the life of Stalin imply that his paranoid personality and lack of compassion stem from the brutal circumstances of his upbringing. He is commonly portrayed as an ignorant thug. Khlevniuk dispels that notion. He writes, “By many measures, Stalin’s childhood was ordinary or even comfortable.” His mother could read and fiercely pursued all possibilities for him to receive an education. Because he was a “model student” and his mother used all the resources at her disposal, Stalin benefited from ten years of religious education, including four in a seminary—he was studying for the priesthood—and gained a lifelong love of reading.He was also well-traveled early in his life, visiting Stockholm, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Krakow. Apparently, too, he could read English, French, and German to some extent. For a time before the Revolution, he was the editor of Pravda. And he had a prodigious memory. The man was formidable. In most respects, it was difficult to distinguish him from the middle-class intellectuals who predominated in the Bolshevik leadership—other than that he was just a little smarter than most.About the authorWikipedia notes that Oleg V. Khlevniuk (1959-) “is a historian and a senior researcher at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. Much of his writing on Stalinist Soviet Union is based on newly released archival documents, including personal correspondence, drafts of Central Committee paperwork, new memoirs, and interviews with former functionaries and the families of Politburo members.” Stalin is his sixth book.

⭐This is a book about how a terrible person can rise to supreme authority and cause so much suffering. It’s also a cautionary tale about how complacency and underestimation of a man’s willingness to sacrifice anything and anyone to obtain power, can lead to a corruption of even a strong nation’s values, laws, and traditions.There are terrifying scenes of purges of ‘enemies of the people’ that show the dictators’ relentless force – without empathy or remorse or pity. Interspersed between these horrors are flash forwards to a sick and increasingly infirm tyrant, which try to evoke such feelings in the reader.I believe the old cliche about ‘history repeating itself.’ That being said, there are some tough lessons here about how not to survive under a dictator. You can’t just keep your head down and do your job, because what is patriotic one day can later be determined to have been against the government on another. You can’t rely on being a friend or ally, because the winds of whim and opinion can change in a moment with devastating consequences. You can’t even run. If the dictator wants you gone badly enough, you can find yourself in a deadly encounter with a pickaxe half a world away.An engaging and well written history, but one that ends a bit short. Stalin’s death comes at around the 60% mark, and the book actually ends at 80% with the remainder being taken up by photographs of the dictator and a lengthy footnotes section.

⭐I remember when Stalin was still alive. A miasma of fear surrounded his name. It made no difference whether someone believed Stalin was a terrible monster or that he was the stern and slandered point man leading to the new world. Clearly, the Soviet Leader took Machiavelli’s dictum to heart: best to be feared. Preferring secrecy, at times duplicitous, able to handle convoluted situations with a winning hand, Stalin maneuvered through thirty years of challenging and difficult events. But what was he really like?There are many fine biographies of Stalin, starting with Trotsky’s interesting rendering of Stalin and proceeding to the excellent works of Ulam and Tucker. Then General Volkogonov open real archives and a richer and more nuanced image began to emerge. Archival information, added to memoirs and other sources produced, in the hands of Radzinsky and Montefiore, intriguing and compelling images.Oleg Khlevniuk has written a book, not about Soviet history, but about Stalin. Here is the man as he saw himself, as others saw him, and as he interacted with others. Solidly based on primary sources, using notes, agendas, memoirs, writings in Stalin’s hand, and other such materials made during the events, Khlevniuk draws an image of Stalin that reveals itself as the pages pass. Of course, at the bottom remains the mystery of personality but Khlevniuk’s picture is clearer than most.A word about the book’s organization: Khlevniuk starts each of the seven sections with narratives of events during Stalin’s death. Each section, chronologically presented, picks up themes from the death scene. This allows Khlevniuk to balance both chronological integrity and topical treatments in a skillful narrative. Moreover, Khlevniuk presents his materials in a way that allows the reader to see how different interpretations can apply to the same event.This is a very good read and an important book on Stalin.

⭐Having recently had the trauma of reading the beginning of Stephen cock kins absolutely dreadful, rubbish, popularist drivel biography of Stalin I did not know what I was expecting with this book. I certainly did not expect it to be the best written biography I have ever read of anybody. The format is just superb. The way he into links between the last two days of Stalin‘s death and telling his life story. Really well done.There is nothing particularly new in the content, although his heavy reliance on archives means that it is more factual than some. I really like seabag Montefiore is caught at the red tzar, but to be fair a lot of that is probably supposition. There is definitely no supposition in this book. Paragraph he is very clear when he cannot confirm a source or story.Being somebody who is quite happy to read 1000 pages, I was a bit surprised at the relatively short length of this book. I thought there is no way he would be able to cover everything. But he does. I will go back to Roberts services biography of stalin for much more detail, but if anybody wants to start with an introductory biography which will probably give you the general reader everything you will ever need then go to this book. Really important contribution to the list of stalin biographies. Excellent.

⭐There is a lot written about Stalin, one of the top three dictators of the twentieth century when it comes to brutality and power. I have not read other biographies about Stalin for several decades so I can not compare with other recent works but this one is a very well done study.The Book has a somewhat odd storyline with the main chapters in chronological order and a separate line based on his death and certain aspects of his life. Initially I found it to be somewhat strange but after a while I found it to be working well. It was better to read about the private Stalin and his families in a concentrated chapter than reading bits and pieces here and there.Having read a lot of history about the Soviet Union and Russia I know there are parts that are at times very boring and hard to get through (like the inner workings of the Communist Party) but Oleg Khlevniuk manages to balance this in a good way so the flow of the reading does not slow done.It is impressive that he manages to present Stalin in just 330 pages. It could easily have been more than twice as much but that would probably have left the book to a few specialists to enjoy. As written it is a very well balanced account.This book tells us about who he was, what he did and as far as can be certain, why he did it. It is also a warning for todays citizens of Russia not to let it happen again.The only thing that I missed in the book was an appendix listing the various people in the text and identifying them better. As it is there are a lot of important people in the book that are often presented with just their names. The truly horrible Beira is just one of the members of Stalins inner circle but who was he and why did Stalin not react to his crimes?But this was a very well done study and since I will be visiting the Stalin Museum in Gori Georgia in a few weeks it was a perfect introduction.

⭐Muito mais do que ficar somente focando na personalidade do odioso Stálin, passa ainda uma perspectiva ampla da URSS, abordando seus fatores políticos, econômicos e sociais.De uma imparcialidade enorme, com pesquisa visivelmente bem feita e um competente senso crítico, que se nota por, por exemplo, notar o absurdo de querer colocar Marx como responsável pelas atrocidades da URSS.Infelizmente, nunca saberemos o que poderia ter sido da URSS sem a influência devastadora do anão Stálin. Cabe a nós aprendermos com os erros e buscar um mundo livre e justo.an excellent biography of this evil man: the translation is seemless.one of the best biographs I have read. actually entertaiing

⭐Cover was blurry and it’s was not a biography about Stalin but a biography about his politics

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