Product Description

For ten years General Dmitri Volkogonov studied military records, party archives, trial documents, and other long-suppressed evidence from the era of the purges- one of the most painful and turbulent periods in Russian history. This is the definitive account of the man, the time, and the tragedy. The author had an incredible access to secret KGB files in his role as historian for the Soviet Army, and he pieces together the story of the man who for thirty years controlled the minds and bodies of the hundreds and millions of people of the Soviet Union. This book, the first of a trilogy written by Volkogonov on Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, takes advantage of the author's discoveries to reveal much heretofore unknown knowledge about Stalin's reign of terror in the early days of the Soviet Union.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1205743 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-01
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The most candid and fullest reappraisal of Stalin to date by a Soviet source, this chilling, remarkably intimate, gripping biography marks an historical as well as scholarly event. How was it possible for an inconspicuous Party functionary, with only a modest role in the October Revolution, to become messianic arbiter of the fate of millions via terror, mass murder, exile and deportation? Drawing on hitherto untapped major archives as well as on interviews, Soviet historian Volkogonov shows how Stalin built an omnipotent bureaucracy to serve his cruelest whims and abetted the slide toward one-man dictatorship. We see a "great actor" conning the populace into worshiping him as "good tsar" even as he liquidated imagined enemies and turned rural workers into mindless cogs in a collectivized agrarian machine. The author, a deputy in the Russian parliament, lost his father to Stalin's executioners. With great narrative skill, he dramatically documents Stalin's paranoia and hunger for power, his purge of the officer corps, his secret diplomacy with Nazi Germany and massive, bloody bungling during WW II. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
In this unrelenting biography, former Soviet Colonel General Volkogonov mines archives still closed to historians, interviews eyewitnesses--and presents perhaps the most intimate look to date at Stalin's monstrousness and his nation's complicity. Volkogonov, whose father was murdered in a purge that placed the family under a political cloud, nonetheless rose through Army ranks to become deputy chief of military political indoctrination. He was thus uniquely placed to examine secret Communist Party, NKVD, military, and other archives (and even studied the marginalia of Stalin's private library). Stalin, a masterful actor with an extraordinary memory (especially for grudges), went to great lengths to conceal his role as mass murderer and to establish himself as universal expert and demigod in the public mind: ``the total embodiment of absolute good...[who] repudiates evil, ignorance, treachery, cruelty. He is that smiling man with the moustache who is carrying the little girl waving the flag.'' Going behind this mountain range of deceit, Volkogonov exposes Stalin, who was expelled from seminary, as a man who had an unremarkable Party record under Lenin; who, when he gained total power (through consistent application of coercion and terror), was nonetheless a weak theoretician and an inept military commander; and who systematically executed every official who knew him when he was obscure and could thus threaten his mythology. The author also explores how and why Russia was willing to submit with zest to this regime and to an absolute dictator whose triumph was the nation's tragedy. A riveting account that adds great depth to the widely known outline of Stalin's crimes. (Twenty-four pages of photographs--not seen). -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

Customer Reviews

Readable historically significant
There have been a number of biographies written in the west about Stalin the Soviet dictator. This is the first Russian book that is not simply a piece of hackwork. The writer has had full access to all Soviet archives. These archives had been kept from all other writers.

The writer was a red army general and the general expectations from the west were that his work would be of poor quality. This book was written with the approval of the Soviet General Staff before the complete collapse of communism. Volkogonov had been a prolific author but his previous works to use the words of the New York Review of Books "none of his previous works had hinted at independence, rigor or critical thought."

It was thus a surprise to find that the book departed form the party line and showed independence from the ideas of the old Soviet State. During the writing of the book the author examined thousands of files in which Stalin either ordered the murder of Soviet citizens or agreed to them. The writer's father was in fact one of Stalin's victims and he found out the details of what had happened during his research. After finishing the book he joined Yelstin's government as indicative of his break with the past.

Stalin was for his early life a fringe figure of the Bolshevik movement. He rose to prominence as he organized a large number of armed robberies that proved important to the parties' finances. Around the time of the revolution he became a trusted associate of Lenin. After Lenin's death Stalin entrenched himself in the rather unglamorous job of running the bureaucratic apparatus of the Communist Party. The other contenders for leadership took more glamorous positions. Stalin basically was able to stack the organs of power with his men and he seized power murdering his other rivals.

Initially Stalin was seen as an economic moderate. He had supported the continuation of a private agricultural sector. By the late twenties and early thirties he decided on a policy of force industrialization. To pay for the imports that were necessary he had to export huge amounts of agricultural products. To do this he introduced collectivization of the farming sector. This was bitterly resented by farmers especially in the Ukraine and Stalin murdered around 3 million farmers by starving them to death.

The forced industrialization of Russia proceeded at a breakneck pace with growth rates of around 5% a year. All of the growth however was going back into expansion of secondary industry. This meant that his regime was unpopular and only kept in power because of its security apparatus. In 1934 Stalin's likely successor Kirov was murdered. This set of a number of purges or the random killing of communist party officials. It would seem that the reason for this was to forestall opposition in a desperately unpopular regime. Just before he war some 40,000 army officers were liquidated in further purges. Again these were clearly aimed at keeping the army from opposing the regime.

In 1941 Russia was invaded and the first few months were a disaster with some 3 million Soviet troops being captured and the loss of about half of European Russia. Despite this colossal reversal Russia was able to recover and defeat Germany and to the enslave Eastern Europe for forty years.

Russians in considering their history prior to Volkogonov have accepted Stalin's crimes. They have however suggested that he has an important place in history as the industrialization in the thirties turned Russia from the weak power which had succumbed to Germany in the first world war to the superpower which went on to dominate the world for forty years. Secondly Stalin's apologists have suggested that his rock solid tyranny was able to keep together Russia in a time of crisis and in the end not only saved itself but to destroy a tyranny far worse.

Volkogonov in fact attacks this myth and suggests that the purges and Stalin's actions in 1941 lay at the heart of the military defeat.

The book contains no new surprises such as revealing if it was Stalin who killed Kirov. It also does not allow us to quantify Stalin's crimes in any more detail. It is however a readable biography of one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. The tragedy of the last century is of course that its three most significant figures have been criminals.

The Monster from Georgia
This is the best biography of Stalin there is, in my opinion. Volkogonov simply had the access to the kind of materials no one else had. This book takes full advantage of them. It correctly depicts Stalin as a great actor who sold his image to the masses, the image of benevolent and infallible ruler. In contrast to his fascist counterparts, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin did not have a good speaking ability, and often read his boring speeches monotonously. But his self-assured and reassuring monotony came to have a hypnotic effect. His smile and almost goofy mustache and eyebrows covered the soul of a despot.

Stalin was a single-minded individual: for him, power came before everything else. A Georgian nationalist who called himself Koba in his youth and resented Russian rule over his people, he rose to become Stalin (man of steel) who ruled over the new Russian Empire called the Soviet Union. Volkogonov gives us the most factual biography yet of the man who slaughtered millions in the name of the workers' paradise and future generations; the man who feared and obsessed over Adolph Hitler and who ultimately defeated him; the man whose cruelty and destruction are a warning to all future generations not to lend a sympathetic ear to promises of future earthly utopias in exchange for absolute power and elimination of civil rights.

the best book on Stalin, a timepiece, frame it
I bought this book first when I was in Russia. I bought it in the original Russian. I had already read Volkogonovs study of Lenin and Trotsky and his book 'Autopsy of the Soviet empire'. THis, though, is the seminal work of a man who passed far to quickly from our view. He had yearned to detail the crimes of Stalin, the secrets also. This grand book details many obscure facts not found in other books. DIsjointed writing,as anyone fmailiar with VOlkogonov knows, this book nevertheless is very readable. Many critisize this saying it was not written by a true historian, its not organized, it smacks of a freshmens writing, in that it does not develop a topic thouroughly before going on to something else. It jumps around. THis is all true. Mr. Volkogonov was not a writer by trade. He was a military bureacrat who yearned to breeth free and compiled this information, independent of the west, for years before publishing his account after the fall of the Soviet empire. If we view it that way this book is unique, it is a testimony of a man who witnessed the evils of the Soviet system, who knew personally what Stalin had done and wanted to expose it. He could weight the good and the bad. This book is invaluable as history. It is by a Russian writing about the failings of his own country, in its formative period nonetheless. A must have and a must read. A landmark in Soviet studies.