Swarthout’s Reviews > On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics > Status Update

"Stalin personally edited Zhdanov’s speech to the Leningrad writers and was uncharacteristically warm in his praise of the text, a document of interest, among other things, for its thoughtful inclusion of staging instructions (“stormy applause” at appropriate moments)."

"Stalin was an indefatigable reader, with an estimated norm of five hundred pages a day, covering history, sociology, economics, and Russian literature—classical and contemporary—as well as contemporary affairs".