... 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.

University of Michigan history professor Ronald Grigor Suny has written a massive, extensively researched biography of Josef Stalin’s early years..

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.