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Stalin: A Biography Robert Service
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Robert Service is
widely acknowledged as one of our finest contemporary historians of Drawing on hitherto
unpublished material from the Moscow archives, only recently opened up to
Western scholars, and on personal testimonies and private papers gathered
from all over Russia, Georgia and Abkhazia, Service challenges the
conventional view of the Soviet leader as simply a murderous bureaucrat. |
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When he rose to supreme
power in 1928 Stalin was fifty. Service describes in unprecedented detail the
formative influences that created the 'Man of Steel': his early childhood in
Georgia as the son of a violent drunkard and a devout woman; his enrolment in
a religious seminary; and his days as a young revolutionary and dedicated
Marxist, whose zeal saw him an established and able member of the Bolshevik
Party leadership long before the Russian Revolution. We see Stalin's role in
the civil war of 1918-20 and the way in which his actions throughout that conflict
prefigure the Stalin of the Great Terror. But Service also shows us a man of
ideas: a voracious reader and accomplished poet whose analytical rigour was a match for Lenin and his fellow architects of
Soviet Russia. Evidence about Stalin
has always been opaque, orchestrated by his relentless silencing of witnesses
and his systematic distortion, concealment and destruction of documents.
Robert Service's thirty-year engagement with his subject and his recent
meticulous research enable him to reconstruct the man behind the myths, in
what is the most authoritative account of Stalin's long career, of his impact
and of his extraordinary personality. Robert Service is the author of the
highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography (which won the US ForeWord in 2000), A History of Twentieth-Century
Russia and Russia: Experiment with a People as well as many other
books on |
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