Published: 29 October 2018
ISBN: 9780141027951
Imprint: Penguin Press
Format: Paperback
Pages: 912
RRP: $34.99

Categories:

Biography

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Stalin, Vol. II

Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941

Stephen Kotkin

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One of the great works of modern history - the definitive biography of one of the world's most powerful and frightening rulers.

Stalin's life is one of the most extraordinary of the modern era and Stephen Kotkin's new biography is the first to do full justice, both to the man himself and to the world which he both dominated and ruined. This second volume is the story of the 'mature' dictator - a figure who had no precedent in ability to shape the USSR and its people. It is the great achievement of this book that it places Stalin both in the context of his day-to-day life in the Kremlin and in the far wider Communist world of which he was the apex. The terror state, the industrial state and the ideological state were all brought together by Stalin and no account of the inter-war world will be complete now without Kotkin's book. It ends when the 'waiting for Hitler' finally came to an end, transforming the nature of the threat faced by both Stalin and the whole society he had shaped.

Published: 29 October 2018
ISBN: 9780141027951
Imprint: Penguin Press
Format: Paperback
Pages: 912
RRP: $34.99

Categories:

Biography

Share…

About the author

Stephen Kotkin

Stephen Kotkin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, with a joint appointment as Professor of International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School. He is the author of the enormously influential books Magnetic Mountain:Stalinism as a Civilization and Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970—2000 and contributes regularly to The New York Times, The New Republic, and the BBC.

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Praise for Stalin, Vol. II

The War and Peace of history . . . one of the greatest historical achievements of our age . . . it covers the 1930s, when Stalin forced through the collectivisation of the peasantry, presided over a horrific, arguably genocidal famine, ordered a savage purge of his own regime and stunned the world with the Nazi-Soviet Pact
Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

A masterpiece, one of the most remarkable books on twentieth-century history to have been published in many years
Mark Mazower, Guardian

'This is the definitive biography of Stalin . . . the most gripping of reads ... the portrait that emerges is of a phenomenally hard-working, ruthless, ideologically driven and coldly calculating tyrant' 'Will surely stand for years to come as a seminal account of some of the most devastating events of the twentieth century' Mark Atwood Lawrence, The New York Times
John Thornhill, Financial Times