Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives [Paperback]

Edvard Radzinsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 1997

From the author of The Last Tsar, the first full-scale life of Stalin to have what no previous biography has entirely gotten hold of: the facts. Granted privileged access to Russia's secret archives, Edvard Radzinsky paints a picture of the Soviet strongman as more calculating, ruthless, and blood-crazed than has ever been described or imagined. Stalin was a man for whom power was all, terror a useful weapon, and deceit a constant companion.

As Radzinsky narrates the high drama of Stalin's epic quest for domination-first within the Communist Party, then over the Soviet Union and the world-he uncovers the startling truth about this most enigmatic of historical figures. Only now, in the post-Soviet era, can what was suppressed be told: Stalin's long-denied involvement with terrorism as a young revolutionary; the crucial importance of his misunderstood, behind-the-scenes role during the October Revolution; his often hostile relationship with Lenin; the details of his organization of terror, culminating in the infamous show trials of the 1930s; his secret dealings with Hitler, and how they backfired; and the horrifying plans he was making before his death to send the Soviet Union's Jews to concentration camps-tantamount to a potential second Holocaust. Radzinsky also takes an intimate look at Stalin's private life, marked by his turbulent relationship with his wife Nadezhda, and recreates the circumstances that led to her suicide.

As he did in The Last Tsar, Radzinsky thrillingly brings the past to life. The Kremlin intrigues, the ceaseless round of double-dealing and back-stabbing, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class-all become, in Radzinsky's hands, as gripping and powerful as the great Russian sagas. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might--and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history--is solved.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Granted privileged access to Russia's secret archives, Edvard Radzinsky has broken down the iron curtain of myth, secrecy and lies that has surrounded Stalin's life and career, painting a picture of the Soviet strongman as more calculating, ruthless and blood-crazed than has ever been described or imagined. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Russian historian and playwright Radzinsky, whose bestselling The Last Tsar chronicled the assassination of the Romanov royal family, has produced a vivid, astonishingly intimate biography of Joseph Stalin. By drawing heavily on previously unavailable primary-source documents in recently opened party, state and KGB archives, he portrays the Soviet dictator as even more sadistic and methodically demoniacal than Western historians had supposed. Pointing to the young revolutionary's repeated escapes and trips abroad, Radzinsky builds an intriguing circumstantial case that Stalin was a double agent working for both the Bolshevik cause and the czarist secret police. He documents how Lenin recruited Stalin into terrorist violence and used him to tame and crush dissidence within the party ranks. Through interviews with Stalin's granddaughter and with the niece of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, the dictator's wife, Radzinsky pieces together the violent quarrel between Stalin and his wife that led to her suicide weeks before she was to have major surgery. Using oral testimonies, the author deduces that Stalin's murderous anti-Semitic campaign of 1953?whose goal was the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan?was a prelude to his plan to launch a third world war. Radzinsky also tracked down one of Stalin's bodyguards, Peter Lozgachev, whose testimony that Stalin's guards deliberately denied him medical attention and left him to die adds weight to the author's hypothesis that Stalin was eliminated by close aide Lavrenti Beria (who reportedly boasted, "I took him out") as part of a conspiracy to avert nuclear Armageddon. Stalin died in 1953, aged 74 by standard sources, although Radzinsky maintains he was a year older. Photos. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (August 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385479549
• ISBN-13: 978-0385479547
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.3 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Revealing biography of a mass murderer, August 12, 2001

By 

P. Bjel (Richmond Hill, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives (Paperback)

I read this book over a year ago, yet the images it conveys still disturb me. First recommended to be by an uncle, I read it to further understand why and how Communism acquired such a nasty reputation, and it did not take long to learn that Joseph Stalin was the focal point behind this bad rap. Even though this book is a translation from Russian, it reads and flows well; Radzinsky is an excellent writer. His book first appeared in 1996, almost in the form of a breakthrough, because it used newly declassified Russian documents on Stalin, who took every effort in purging archives (and people) in keeping his life and details a secret.

Radzinsky meticulously chronicles the life of Stalin (born as Iosif Dzhugashvili in Georgia) from his troubled and rabble-rousing youth growing up in the Caucasus, to his life as a young revolutionary at Lenins side. Radzinsky writes that during those years, Stalin went through two transitions: one as Soso, the child, and as Koba, the revolutionary. With gripping narration, he chronicles how Stalin (his nom de guerre) scrambled for absolute power following the death of Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism.

What stands out in Radzinskys biography is not just the now-illuminated life of Stalin, which had deliberately been shrouded in mystery and speculation for fifty years, but more importantly the details of Stalins crimes. Although known for his complacency in mass murder during his years in power, both sympathizers and others that wanted to keep Stalins tyranny a secret never revealed the full extent of such crimes. Radzinsky chronicles them, and shows that this malevolent dictator was even more blood-crazed and paranoid than ever imagined. To Stalin, no human life was sacred, hence the atrocious scope of his show trials, liquidations and deportations to Siberia.

A perfect example of Stalins culpability in massacre after massacre is the infamous killing at Katyn Forest, which Radzinsky does not date; the reader can be confused as to the precise date, which was in the fall of 1939, in the wake of Hitlers invasion of Poland. About 20,000 Polish prisoners were quartered in camps close to the Soviet border, and when Stalin was later preparing a counterattack on Germany, he had them all massacred in a forest in Katyn, balking at the idea of having so many potential enemies within his grasp. He later released some two thousand Polish prisoners from other camps, trying to hide his culpability, but Poles abroad kept wondering how so many thousands of soldiers had just vanished. The answer given was that they had run away from the camps at the beginning of the war (p. 498). In the presence of a Polish representative, Stalin playacted that Poles from all Soviet prisons had been released. When the Germans occupied Smolensk, they found evidence of a massacre at Katyn and the decayed (and shot) remains of the Polish officers. Stalin changed the story altogether: accusing Hitler of provocation, he said the Poles had not run off, but had been transferred to Smolensk to build, where it was made to believe that the Germans caught them and shot them. In all, it became known that 21,857 Poles had been massacred. (pp. 498-499). The Germans were the first ones to be blamed for the killings, without surprise, but Stalin was the true architect from the very beginning. All documents on the Katyn massacre were ordered destroyed by Khrushchev in 1959, though some had evidently been overlooked, and preserved.

Katyn is one instance of many in Stalins years in power. If anything, Radzinskys biography serves to hold Stalin accountable for the terror he inflicted and to let the truth be known, for the sake of those lives lost under Stalin. On pp. 3-4, in Radzinskys Prologue, he symbolically refers to a statue of Stalin overlooking the Volga canal, in which many slave laborers died digging and building it. Birds would gather on the statues head and leave droppings, so the caretaker of the statue decided to electrify the statue, and every morning afterwards would come to clean the tiny bodies of birds littered around the statue. While the statue, cleansed of bird droppings, gazed out on the great expanse beyond the Volga, fertilized by the bodies not of birds but of human beings, by the unmarked graves of those who had built the great canal (p. 4). Oh the irony...

237 of 291 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Propaganda, not history, November 13, 2002

By 

Andrew Mendelssohn (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives (Paperback)

I read this book with great expectations and was incredibly disappointed, to the point of anger.
Stalin was undoubtedly a monster, but this book treats its subject matter, especially during the crucial revolution and war periods, as if it were a cartoon. This alone is forgivable. What is not forgivable are gross distortions of facts and in some cases out and out lies regarding history.
For example, Radzinsky claims the following:
1. Stalin had Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad blessed by a parade of holy icons after the German invasion (as a result of prompting by the orthodox church). Radzinsky claims that this is the ONLY book that exposes this. Why? Well, this is the only book because this didn't happen.
2. Radzinsky claims that the Americans gave into Stalinist blackmail for a part in post-war Japan policy after Stalin threatened to expose the Americans' theft of Japan's national gold. This is a simple lie.
3. America only occupied Japan as 'they already lost China.' China fell to communism in 1949, four years later, and Mao and the Soviets always had a strained relationship.
4. Zhukov received the unconditional German surrender. False, Eisenhower did and the Soviet Marshall who signed the document was executed the next week in Moscow for doing it without Stalin's approval.
5. Stalin was planning on fighting the West just prior to his death, as he had the H-bomb first. A big lie - the Americans tested the first fusion bomb in 1952 and had a working weapon soon thereafter. The Soviets didn't have a test until after Stalin's death.
6. The only minority in the Soviet Union to help the Germans was the Chechyans - only if you ignore the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, etc. Radzinsky ultimately contradicts himself.

The book seems to have a few points:
1. Stalin was a monster.
2. Stalin still saved the world from the Nazis because he relied on Orthodox Russian nationalism.
3. The Russians are the strongest people in the world.
4. Russia will never be able to get true help or friendship from the West.
5. Russia must rely on its orthodox nationalism to win.

I should tell you I lived in Russia for some time, and I have a good knowledge of Russian history. Further, books of this kind simply do not get published without some political sponsorship. This book was published in 1996 during the presidential campaign in Russia and should be seen in this light - it is more a statement about current Russian political thought than real history.
Bashing the achievements of the West is still good politics and business in Russia. Another book published in the last few years gave 'scientific evidence' how NASA faked the moonlandings. As a result, most Russians younger than 40 do not believe that man walked on the moon. Indeed, this has resulted in some comedy between my friends and myself.
Please, if you insist on reading this book do not read it in a vacuum. I could write a list pages long on factual mistakes in the book, but see for yourself. The last 100 pages, especially the chapters on WWII, are exceptionally bad. I do not believe these errors were accidents - as I stated, this book is more a comment about current Russian politics than Stalin, and anyway, there are too many mistakes to be random. Its a crime, actually: both the subject and the country deserve better.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An authoritative book on Stalin, April 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives (Paperback)

This book by Edvard Radzinsky is one of the latest on the subject. Though a lot has been written on Stalin over the years, this biography is clearly one of a kind. First, in the introduction, the author clearly states that, unlike most of his fellow Soviet compatriots, he hated Stalin. This subjectivity only gives more weight to the book's objectivity. It shows Stalin in all his pragmatism. How the 28 million people he sent to death were not an act of mere paranoia but a way to consolidate his own power. It could be summed up as "If I kill them, they can't kill me". And Radzinsky explains how he managed to do that for a quarter of century. He displays all the tricks Stalin used to seize power in the late twenties and how he kept it and even gained more power in the thirties. Radzinsky goes beyond much of what has been previously said and shows evidence that goes against general ideas about Stalin (for instance, the common belief that the USSR was so easily attacked by Hitler because of the military purges). Having access to whole new ressources because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Radzinsky delivers here nothing less than a tour de force on one of the most fascinating leaders our civilization has ever had to deal with.