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Maybe someday
43
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
71/100Critics
15/100Scholars
Author:
Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Date:
October 6, 2020
This is a biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, an account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators.
What The Reviewers Say
... even the most intrepid among [readers] may balk at the prospect of spending yet another 800 pages with the same sloe-eyed psychopath who’s already occupied an army of biographers over the course of millions of pages.
...Ronald Grigor Suny’s Stalin: Passage to Revolution is a worthy contribution to this continuing enterprise [of writing Stalin's biography].
...The book’s strength lies not in any innovative, broad analysis but in its excavation of important episodes of the early years. Above all, Suny knows Georgia.
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.
