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Stalin: The Man and His Era
With a new Introduction by the Author
760 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
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173 people want to read
About the author
Adam B. Ulam
68 books6 followersAdam Bruno Ulam was a Polish-American historian and political scientist at Harvard University. Ulam was one of the world's foremost authorities on Russia and the Soviet Union, and the author of twenty books and many articles.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 22, 2016
Stalin: The Man and His Era,
By Adam B. Ulam
Greg Cusack
March 22, 2016
Although this is not a recent book (my handwritten scrawl inside the cover shows that I bought it in 1974!), it is incredibly researched, beautifully written, and devastating in its revelations.
I honestly do not know why I have avoided reading this book until now – perhaps I was initially put off by my involvement in politics (in ’74 I was in my second year as a freshman member of the Iowa House of Representatives, and up to my gills in activity) and/or by its length (740 pages of small type). In the years since I bought it I have read copiously other treatises about Stalin, the Soviet Union, and postwar Russia, but nothing I have previously encountered conveyed as thoroughly what it must have been like to have been a Soviet citizen during those terribly tough years!
I have ruefully concluded – being much more honest with myself than I once was – that my only choices had I been in those circumstances during those times would have been either to have spoken out (and, thus, definitely silenced, probably killed) or, ashamedly more probably, have become one of his agile lackeys.
Stalin clearly possessed many gifts: a good mind, a widespread reader, and an astounding ability to assess others’ moods, intentions, and needs when dealing with them. He could be very shrewd – and, as his diplomatic record shows – very successful when he was dealing with people who, if not his exact equal, nonetheless were beyond his ability to control. In such cases, he was a supreme realist, and many of his gambles (so judged by others) were actually based upon shrewd and highly accurate estimates of what his opponent was most likely to do. He had an incredible ability to master intimate details of others’ societies, and had an astounding memory for data and statistics.
But there was the other Stalin, as well: the man who came to embody total power by the late ‘20s. And this Stalin became ever deeper mired in the fun house mirrors of his own suspicions. Yes, he was the acknowledged and unchallenged supreme leader but…precisely for this reason there must be “some” who were jealous or resentful and, therefore, who were – even now – conspiring against him.
The trouble was, the more he hunted down and silenced – or eliminated – such persons, the more seemed to possibly be lurking in the wings. These could be fellow members of the original Bolsheviks – whose primary threat was that they remembered what he was like before he became supreme leader – or foreign spies, or even those who knew or associated with foreigners (including diplomatic personnel or those unfortunate soldiers who were imprisoned by, say, the Germans during WWII).
It was interesting to see how his personal desire for power – and heightened paranoia – was clearly married to a conviction that Marxism-Leninism was the future and that bourgeois capitalism, in all of its forms, was the enemy. This helps explain his harshness in dealing with the kulaks – those small farmers (rural capitalists) who owned their own land, or who owned a horse or cow, or who employed a few workers – they were one of the enemies of communism. This conviction, coupled with his desire to socialize the means of production, including agriculture, is what lay behind his forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1920s, an experiment to which he rigidly adhered despite its mounting costs through extensive famine and lost production of millions of human lives and declining agricultural goods.
Ultimately, this book leaves me with two thoughts:
1. How great as the cost paid by the poor Soviet people, including those who after World War II were incorporated into the Soviet Union! So many lives lost, so many exiles, deportations, and deprivations! How did their human spirit survive?
2. Representative governments can be corrupt, non-responsive, even replete with knaves and scoundrels, yet nothing in them approaches the dangers – even outright evils – of totalitarian rule! Where one person essentially holds all the cards absolute evil is bound to follow! Without checks and balances, without persons free to challenge the “supreme” authority, little is safe.
I praise Dr. Ulam for his momentous work, and commend it to any who wish insight into the darkness of true tyranny.
April 4, 2025
In 1987, when I visited the USSR on an organized tour, I noticed that there were three movements politically popular that we heard about: Gorbachev’s reforms and what they might lead to, the possibility of the Romanov’s returning to rule, and Stalinism. Since Vladimir Putin took power in 2000, Stalinism has slowly been gaining popularity – no surprise. Putin has reinstated Stalinism as his way of ruling Russia. Stalin wanted to expand the territory of the USSR and succeeded after World War II by gobbling up the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic States, Transcaucasia, and establishing Communist governments in Eastern European countries. Who was this man who had such a powerful influence on Russia? Why is he still influencing that country and its people? The massive biography Stalin: The Man and His Era tries to answer those questions.
The biographer, Adam B. Ulam, was the director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University when he wrote this 760-page biography. It’s a monument to his knowledge of the USSR and deep research. Published in 1973 during Leonid Brezhnev’s reign in the USSR, it cannot foresee that a man named Mikhail Gorbachev would gain power and try to reform the Soviet government, collapsing the Soviet system in the process and liberating all the countries that Stalin had gobbled up. This biography, however, stands as a glimpse into 20th century Russian history and how Vladimir Putin could take power and keep it despite stiff opposition.
Ulam begins with Joseph Vissarionich Djugashvili, born in the small Georgian town of Gori to a factory worker father and a seamstress mother. Both were impoverished peasants. His father liked his vodka and was killed in a drunken brawl when Joseph (Soso) was about eleven. Ulam comments that Soso had been beaten by his father but this had no bearing on the man he was to become. This would have been the prevailing attitude in the early 1970’s about the long-lasting effects of physical or psychological trauma experienced in childhood. I think if this biography had been written in 2024, Soso’s experience of physical and emotional trauma in childhood would have received more than a two-sentence comment. Nevertheless, Ulam does mention at times throughout the book that Soso harbored feelings of inadequacy and inferiority that drove him to his revolutionary and political achievements.
He received his education thanks to his mother, who worked hard to save the money to send him to the Tiflis Theological Seminary where he would begin to make connections with the young men who introduced him to Marx, Engels, and Bolshevism. After joining the Bolsheviks, he became known as Koba Djugashvili, or just Koba. He was a “working” revolutionary, unafraid to get his hands dirty with illegal activities in support of the cause. This brought him to the attention of the Bolshevik leaders in Georgia. He wasn’t as talented at not getting caught, however, and he spent time in Tsarist prisons and in exile in Siberia. By 1917, he had risen in the Bolshevik movement to become one of the respected leaders. We probably would have called him a Type A personality nowadays, or an overachiever. But he was also intelligent and cunning, with a gift and love for playing political intrigue, as he demonstrated throughout the 1920’s.
The Bolsheviks had a tough time establishing themselves in Moscow and consolidating their power. A civil war nearly tore the country apart after the October Revolution in 1917. It would last for four years. By 1922, Lenin was in control, and the Bolsheviks began building their government. Koba was in the thick of it. He became close to Lenin, although Lenin didn’t trust him and did not want him to succeed him. As it turned out, Koba had other ideas and had been laying the groundwork for his succession long before 1922. When Lenin died after a long illness in 1924, Koba had become Stalin, one of the top ten men of the Bolsheviks. Ulam spares no detail in showing how Stalin used his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party that he’d acquired in 1922 to climb to the top, stepping on the heads of whoever got in his way. For the rest of the 1920’s, Stalin consolidated his power, becoming like a deity in the Party and the country. As Ulam wrote: “Dictatorship required of the dictator not only ceaseless vigilance and hard work, of which Stalin was more than capable until overcome by old age, but also political restraint, and this in the long run was against his nature.”
Ruthless. Paranoid. Vindictive. Demanding. Cunning. Suspicious. Clever. Intelligent. Charming when he wanted to be, but also terrifying. By the end of the 1920’s, Stalin enjoyed near absolute power. What put him over the top, finally, was collectivization early in the 1930’s – the policy of taking away private ownership of farms and creating large state-owned collectives, and at the same time eliminating the Kulaks, the peasants who had both land and money, and who employed the peasants who had neither. It was brutal. Thousands upon thousands of peasants starved. The Ukraine was hit the hardest. All because Stalin wanted collectivization achieved fast instead of doing a gradual change over time to reduce the suffering. And then came the Great Purges, the first 1933-34, and second far worse in 1936-39. It was the last purge that established terror as a ruling policy. What fascinated me about this period was the reason it began and then continued: Stalin’s paranoia about the military officer corps as well as his own political lieutenants possibly turning against him if war should come to the Soviet Union. At the same time, Stalin was dealing with Hitler, the British and the French, and eventually the Americans, trying to play one against the other in order to ensure that the USSR would not be dragged into a war.
Ulam shows how the Great Purge of 1936-39 was a massive mistake. Even after everyone he wanted shot had been shot, he didn’t feel secure. And then war came in June 1941 when the Nazis invaded Russia in a blitz that shocked Stalin to his core. Ulam confirms that Stalin had a breakdown during the first days of the invasion – he retreated to his dacha for almost a week – leaving his government scrambling to order the defense. The war years were not kind to Stalin. They served to increase his paranoia, his reliance on terror as a method of governing. Ulam details the convoluted intrigues, at least what was available to him at the time, the iron repression, and Stalin’s failing health. He wasn’t a young man, and by the end of World War II, people around him were beginning to question his sanity. He would live another seven and a half years, terrorizing the Soviet people as well as those who served him in the government and military. He had begun setting up a new purge in the fall of 1952 but his death in March 1953 stopped it.
An interesting historical fact: In 1933-34 when America and the USSR were establishing diplomatic relations, there were a lot of things the Americans wanted to clarify, not least of which for the USSR to stay out of their internal affairs. There was the fear that the Soviet Communists would try to destroy American democracy. Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov finally signed a declaration which pledged that the USSR not “injure the tranquility, prosperity, order, or security of any part of the United States, its territories or possessions….Not to permit the formation or residence on its territory of any organization or group…which has as its aim the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow…of the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States.” When I read that, I wondered if that declaration still existed and was still in effect.
Ulam also weaves into his narrative about Stalin’s life from 1930 the idea that dictators succeed in maintaining their power by convincing the population of their created reality. “Both terror and unlimited power were, then, byproducts of Stalin’s ability to create an artificial reality, to transform the country into a vast theater where everyone had to play a role assigned to him.” Stalin saw conspiracies everywhere, fed by his suspicions about the people who surrounded him. “The government of the Soviet Union was a standing conspiracy….The power of one man to destroy so many with impunity depended on his ability to convince, to impose his ‘objective’ reality in the place of a real one.”
There are lessons to be learned from this massive biography about Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the 20th century. There are also policies, actions, behavior that the world would be better without. Stalin and Stalinism offers a blueprint for any wannabe dictator who, like Stalin, has no conscience about using terror to oppress their country in order to have absolute power. Doesn’t have to be Russian, either.
I highly recommend this biography for readers interested in Russian history, dictatorships, or Stalin in particular. Ulam could write rather dry prose at times, but his density of detail was impressive.
The biographer, Adam B. Ulam, was the director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University when he wrote this 760-page biography. It’s a monument to his knowledge of the USSR and deep research. Published in 1973 during Leonid Brezhnev’s reign in the USSR, it cannot foresee that a man named Mikhail Gorbachev would gain power and try to reform the Soviet government, collapsing the Soviet system in the process and liberating all the countries that Stalin had gobbled up. This biography, however, stands as a glimpse into 20th century Russian history and how Vladimir Putin could take power and keep it despite stiff opposition.
Ulam begins with Joseph Vissarionich Djugashvili, born in the small Georgian town of Gori to a factory worker father and a seamstress mother. Both were impoverished peasants. His father liked his vodka and was killed in a drunken brawl when Joseph (Soso) was about eleven. Ulam comments that Soso had been beaten by his father but this had no bearing on the man he was to become. This would have been the prevailing attitude in the early 1970’s about the long-lasting effects of physical or psychological trauma experienced in childhood. I think if this biography had been written in 2024, Soso’s experience of physical and emotional trauma in childhood would have received more than a two-sentence comment. Nevertheless, Ulam does mention at times throughout the book that Soso harbored feelings of inadequacy and inferiority that drove him to his revolutionary and political achievements.
He received his education thanks to his mother, who worked hard to save the money to send him to the Tiflis Theological Seminary where he would begin to make connections with the young men who introduced him to Marx, Engels, and Bolshevism. After joining the Bolsheviks, he became known as Koba Djugashvili, or just Koba. He was a “working” revolutionary, unafraid to get his hands dirty with illegal activities in support of the cause. This brought him to the attention of the Bolshevik leaders in Georgia. He wasn’t as talented at not getting caught, however, and he spent time in Tsarist prisons and in exile in Siberia. By 1917, he had risen in the Bolshevik movement to become one of the respected leaders. We probably would have called him a Type A personality nowadays, or an overachiever. But he was also intelligent and cunning, with a gift and love for playing political intrigue, as he demonstrated throughout the 1920’s.
The Bolsheviks had a tough time establishing themselves in Moscow and consolidating their power. A civil war nearly tore the country apart after the October Revolution in 1917. It would last for four years. By 1922, Lenin was in control, and the Bolsheviks began building their government. Koba was in the thick of it. He became close to Lenin, although Lenin didn’t trust him and did not want him to succeed him. As it turned out, Koba had other ideas and had been laying the groundwork for his succession long before 1922. When Lenin died after a long illness in 1924, Koba had become Stalin, one of the top ten men of the Bolsheviks. Ulam spares no detail in showing how Stalin used his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party that he’d acquired in 1922 to climb to the top, stepping on the heads of whoever got in his way. For the rest of the 1920’s, Stalin consolidated his power, becoming like a deity in the Party and the country. As Ulam wrote: “Dictatorship required of the dictator not only ceaseless vigilance and hard work, of which Stalin was more than capable until overcome by old age, but also political restraint, and this in the long run was against his nature.”
Ruthless. Paranoid. Vindictive. Demanding. Cunning. Suspicious. Clever. Intelligent. Charming when he wanted to be, but also terrifying. By the end of the 1920’s, Stalin enjoyed near absolute power. What put him over the top, finally, was collectivization early in the 1930’s – the policy of taking away private ownership of farms and creating large state-owned collectives, and at the same time eliminating the Kulaks, the peasants who had both land and money, and who employed the peasants who had neither. It was brutal. Thousands upon thousands of peasants starved. The Ukraine was hit the hardest. All because Stalin wanted collectivization achieved fast instead of doing a gradual change over time to reduce the suffering. And then came the Great Purges, the first 1933-34, and second far worse in 1936-39. It was the last purge that established terror as a ruling policy. What fascinated me about this period was the reason it began and then continued: Stalin’s paranoia about the military officer corps as well as his own political lieutenants possibly turning against him if war should come to the Soviet Union. At the same time, Stalin was dealing with Hitler, the British and the French, and eventually the Americans, trying to play one against the other in order to ensure that the USSR would not be dragged into a war.
Ulam shows how the Great Purge of 1936-39 was a massive mistake. Even after everyone he wanted shot had been shot, he didn’t feel secure. And then war came in June 1941 when the Nazis invaded Russia in a blitz that shocked Stalin to his core. Ulam confirms that Stalin had a breakdown during the first days of the invasion – he retreated to his dacha for almost a week – leaving his government scrambling to order the defense. The war years were not kind to Stalin. They served to increase his paranoia, his reliance on terror as a method of governing. Ulam details the convoluted intrigues, at least what was available to him at the time, the iron repression, and Stalin’s failing health. He wasn’t a young man, and by the end of World War II, people around him were beginning to question his sanity. He would live another seven and a half years, terrorizing the Soviet people as well as those who served him in the government and military. He had begun setting up a new purge in the fall of 1952 but his death in March 1953 stopped it.
An interesting historical fact: In 1933-34 when America and the USSR were establishing diplomatic relations, there were a lot of things the Americans wanted to clarify, not least of which for the USSR to stay out of their internal affairs. There was the fear that the Soviet Communists would try to destroy American democracy. Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov finally signed a declaration which pledged that the USSR not “injure the tranquility, prosperity, order, or security of any part of the United States, its territories or possessions….Not to permit the formation or residence on its territory of any organization or group…which has as its aim the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow…of the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States.” When I read that, I wondered if that declaration still existed and was still in effect.
Ulam also weaves into his narrative about Stalin’s life from 1930 the idea that dictators succeed in maintaining their power by convincing the population of their created reality. “Both terror and unlimited power were, then, byproducts of Stalin’s ability to create an artificial reality, to transform the country into a vast theater where everyone had to play a role assigned to him.” Stalin saw conspiracies everywhere, fed by his suspicions about the people who surrounded him. “The government of the Soviet Union was a standing conspiracy….The power of one man to destroy so many with impunity depended on his ability to convince, to impose his ‘objective’ reality in the place of a real one.”
There are lessons to be learned from this massive biography about Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the 20th century. There are also policies, actions, behavior that the world would be better without. Stalin and Stalinism offers a blueprint for any wannabe dictator who, like Stalin, has no conscience about using terror to oppress their country in order to have absolute power. Doesn’t have to be Russian, either.
I highly recommend this biography for readers interested in Russian history, dictatorships, or Stalin in particular. Ulam could write rather dry prose at times, but his density of detail was impressive.
Read
February 26, 2023In the 2oth century there were 3 giants of tyranny, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Collectively they were responsible for millions of deaths and widespread suffering across Europe and Asia.
All three were obsessed with power regardless of the cost to humanity. Hitler lived to see the complete destruction of all he had gained, while Mao and Stalin lived to old age, managing to keep control to the end of their lives. All were obsessed with ideology; that society should be arranged in one particular way. If there were people who objected, even if close associates, then such people would be imprisoned or killed without hesitation and often without warning and without remorse.
This definitive history of Stalin's life, a digital edition being available for free online, leaves out no details in the rise of the dictator from Georgia who, though he was not Russian, came to identify himself as the embodiment of communism, superior in his thinking on the subject to both Marx and Lenin.
He established himself early on with his ability to manage, to get things done while others were dithering and talking. He played a part in the civil war of the White versus the Red armies and became the indispensable righthand man for Lenin. Playing up his image as the no-nonsense man of the countryside with the ability to argue forcefully on Marxism/Leninism with the best of ideologues, he maneuvered to the top by playing off those around him against each other.
While initially this resulted in the promotion of those he favored and the demotion of those he did not, once his power was secure, disagreements could result in banishment and death.
Private property was not allowed after a brief experiment with capitalism in the 1920's. Small farmers were forced onto collective farms. He managed the remarkable feat of bringing on mass starvation in the USSR in the early 1930's by setting impossible agricultural goals for the collective farms and then blaming the farmers for the failure. If a five year plan was not meeting the goals established, it could never because of unreasonable goals. Capitalism not being allowed, the most successful farmers who had cultivated their own land, the kulaks, had to be eliminated and were, turning citizen against citizen under the watchful eye of the secret police.
Obsessed with the idea that no associate or underling could be trusted not to plot Stalin's overthrow, even long time peers were brought down in the famous show trials of the late 1930's. Stalin insisted that those accused of this or that unforgivable crime such as "wrecking" or anti-socialist behavior be made to confess in their own words that they were guilty of every charge and more. This was made possible through torture, sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.
The infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty that Hitler contrived to allow Germany to conquer France and threaten Britain was acceptable to Stalin in order to hold off a German invasion of the USSR for as long as possible. Stalin's purging of the top military brass in the 1930's left the Red Army in confusion when that invasion came.
Turning defeat into final victory over Germany in WW2, Stalin went on to successfully stage manage the takeover of occupied eastern European countries with toadies, the one exception being Tito in Yugoslavia. The author repeatedly admits Stalin's success with foreign policy.
Brutal and uncompromising as Stalin was with the people of the USSR, from the peasantry at the bottom to the leadership in the Politburo, he retained his position and even had the admiration of many who believed strong leadership necessary. Not only did he get things done, he eliminated all those who might get things done in his place. This made for general anxiety about how the country could go on without him. He had fear and helplessness as bodyguards.
Adam Ulam frequently ponders the situation at many points in Stalin's life. At one point he wonders if would be right to call Stalin insane. He answers the question with this powerful passage:
"To most people such behavior (as Stalin's) is hard to explain except in terms of mental aberration. But most people have never exercised absolute power with its fears and temptations; have never been in the position to appease every suspicion, to satisfy their every whim and resentment."
We know power corrupts. While absolute power did corrupt Stalin to the point of being inhuman and becoming a megalomaniac, it did not destroy him as it has many others. He truly believed he was representative of the people and the embodiment of the state right up to the moment of his death from natural causes. He oversaw the rise of the USSR to become a major power, his primary concern no matter the cost.
This book, written in 1973, is considered a classic, deservedly.
All three were obsessed with power regardless of the cost to humanity. Hitler lived to see the complete destruction of all he had gained, while Mao and Stalin lived to old age, managing to keep control to the end of their lives. All were obsessed with ideology; that society should be arranged in one particular way. If there were people who objected, even if close associates, then such people would be imprisoned or killed without hesitation and often without warning and without remorse.
This definitive history of Stalin's life, a digital edition being available for free online, leaves out no details in the rise of the dictator from Georgia who, though he was not Russian, came to identify himself as the embodiment of communism, superior in his thinking on the subject to both Marx and Lenin.
He established himself early on with his ability to manage, to get things done while others were dithering and talking. He played a part in the civil war of the White versus the Red armies and became the indispensable righthand man for Lenin. Playing up his image as the no-nonsense man of the countryside with the ability to argue forcefully on Marxism/Leninism with the best of ideologues, he maneuvered to the top by playing off those around him against each other.
While initially this resulted in the promotion of those he favored and the demotion of those he did not, once his power was secure, disagreements could result in banishment and death.
Private property was not allowed after a brief experiment with capitalism in the 1920's. Small farmers were forced onto collective farms. He managed the remarkable feat of bringing on mass starvation in the USSR in the early 1930's by setting impossible agricultural goals for the collective farms and then blaming the farmers for the failure. If a five year plan was not meeting the goals established, it could never because of unreasonable goals. Capitalism not being allowed, the most successful farmers who had cultivated their own land, the kulaks, had to be eliminated and were, turning citizen against citizen under the watchful eye of the secret police.
Obsessed with the idea that no associate or underling could be trusted not to plot Stalin's overthrow, even long time peers were brought down in the famous show trials of the late 1930's. Stalin insisted that those accused of this or that unforgivable crime such as "wrecking" or anti-socialist behavior be made to confess in their own words that they were guilty of every charge and more. This was made possible through torture, sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.
The infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty that Hitler contrived to allow Germany to conquer France and threaten Britain was acceptable to Stalin in order to hold off a German invasion of the USSR for as long as possible. Stalin's purging of the top military brass in the 1930's left the Red Army in confusion when that invasion came.
Turning defeat into final victory over Germany in WW2, Stalin went on to successfully stage manage the takeover of occupied eastern European countries with toadies, the one exception being Tito in Yugoslavia. The author repeatedly admits Stalin's success with foreign policy.
Brutal and uncompromising as Stalin was with the people of the USSR, from the peasantry at the bottom to the leadership in the Politburo, he retained his position and even had the admiration of many who believed strong leadership necessary. Not only did he get things done, he eliminated all those who might get things done in his place. This made for general anxiety about how the country could go on without him. He had fear and helplessness as bodyguards.
Adam Ulam frequently ponders the situation at many points in Stalin's life. At one point he wonders if would be right to call Stalin insane. He answers the question with this powerful passage:
"To most people such behavior (as Stalin's) is hard to explain except in terms of mental aberration. But most people have never exercised absolute power with its fears and temptations; have never been in the position to appease every suspicion, to satisfy their every whim and resentment."
We know power corrupts. While absolute power did corrupt Stalin to the point of being inhuman and becoming a megalomaniac, it did not destroy him as it has many others. He truly believed he was representative of the people and the embodiment of the state right up to the moment of his death from natural causes. He oversaw the rise of the USSR to become a major power, his primary concern no matter the cost.
This book, written in 1973, is considered a classic, deservedly.
July 27, 2025
If ever a man believed that "if the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts" it was Joseph Stalin. STALIN: THE MAN AND HIS ERA is a brilliant study of power, personality, and the horrors of the twentieth century. Adam Ulam, author of seminal studies in Russian history, THE BOLSHEVIKS, THE COMMUNISTS, and many others, was born to write this biography. In his eyes Stalin was neither an overgrown monster grafted unto Russian history nor a phenomenon made possible by the contours of the first experiment in scientific socialism but one of those rare creatures who seizes the clay of history and molds it into his own image. Stalin made Stalin, yes, but he had plenty of help from the dogmatists who saw his regime as necessary, Nikolai Buhkarin being a prominent ally and victim, and others who underestimated the force of his guile, say Trotsky. Stalin felt more at home with men who shared his lust for power, among them Winston Churchill, until 1945 at least, than with idealists at home and abroad, whom he took for idiots. Ulam is the heir of Gibbon in writing world-class prose in the service of historical analysis. Definitive.
August 20, 2025
A fantastic biography with some editorial decisions I dislike.
April 23, 2007
Ponderous and all second hand. A reader would be better off reading Khrushchev's memoirs for a look at Stalin.
December 20, 2007
A rich and powerful history of the most effective dictator in modern history.
March 22, 2008
The book on Stalin. Stalin is Russia and Russia is Stalin. Amazing since he was Georgian, not Russian
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews