Stalin

Starred review from August 15, 2020
A comprehensive, deeply researched study of one of the world's most brutal dictators as he took the paths that would lead him to power. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was a frail boy who willed himself to improvement, physical and mental, with a program that Theodore Roosevelt would have recognized. He was remarkable, writes history professor Suny, but "at the same time quite ordinary, a small man placed in extraordinary circumstances." Throughout his life, though, Stalin made efforts to excel at all he did, whether singing in a choir or writing poetry. "He was not above correcting his teachers," Suny notes in his long but well-paced narrative. Without dipping too deeply into psychobiography, the author examines aspects of his home life that might have influenced his emergent defensiveness, and later paranoia, including a violent-tempered, alcoholic father and a mother who, though steely, encouraged her son to excel. Stalin left home for school in a larger city, moved into revolutionary circles that soon took him farther afield, and steadily rose in the ranks of Russian Marxists. Along the way, he used what Suny gently calls "dubious means" to consolidate his power as he aligned ever more closely with Lenin, who was in exile during much of the time that Stalin organized revolutionary activities in Moscow and Petrograd. Stalin was in exile, too, but almost immediately escaped from the remote Siberian town where he was sent. He helped engineer the Bolshevik victory over the post-czarist government and their Menshevik rivals. As Suny writes, "it was the more extreme picture sketched by the Bolsheviks--of the whole of propertied society, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries alike, as the enemy of the working class--that brought people out of the factories into the streets." In all that effort--and in his clashes with fellow revolutionaries, notably Leon Trotsky--lay the seed for his later dictatorship. A portrait of the totalitarian as a young artist, of great interest to any student of modern history.

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December 4, 2020

Suny (history, Univ. of Michigan; The Soviet Experiment) concludes this biography of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) with the October Revolution in 1917, more than 35 years before Stalin's death. Initially, one may be wondering if readers need an additional biography of Stalin. However, this work provides an extraordinary account of elusive testimony as well as archival and interpretive material that nicely match its ambitious scope. Suny carefully blends casual episodes in Stalin's early life with the grand narrative of the Soviet Union in early 20th-century Russia. He clearly identifies the basis of Stalin's emergence from obscurity through the centrality of his place in 1917, dispelling the rumor that Stalin missed the revolution or that he had been a spy for the Okhrana, the Tsarist police. Historical records depict a morose and vengeful figure with a dislike of Jews and distrust of intellectuals. As Suny notes, Stalin is also a person of energy and persistence, and a "practiced performer" who, despite errors of judgment, emerges as consistently loyal to politician Vladimir Lenin. Suny explains Stalin's place in the Revolution and his tactical, strategic, and theoretical positions in Soviet history. VERDICT This impressively researched biography provides remarkable and reliable details on the first part of Stalin's life, along with the many fissures among the Left Communists. An important accomplishment.--Zachary Irwin, formerly with Penn State Behrend

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