This book shows evidence of exhaustive research on Tucker's part, which leads me to my two chief criticisms of this book. The first one is that this book is far too long; I felt it could easily have been compressed to 300 pages, instead of the 900 pages that Tucker ended up writing. Because of its length, this book contains a myriad of minutiae, including many details about Stalin's various political machinations, which made the book plodding at times.
The second criticism I have is that Tucker relies heavily on psychological explanations for Stalin's behavior. While it is important to look for explanations of why people act the way they do, I think that it is better to focus on people's actions and words to help us understand them. Psychoanalysis can often lead to speculation that might not lead to accurate answers or valid understandings of human behavior.
However, I did learn a number of very interesting things about Joseph Stalin and his policies, especially with regard to his foreign policy. For example, I learned that he played a very long game in his foreign policy, seeking to promote war among non-Communist nations with the aim of having them fight each other, and then having the Soviet Union enter the war at an opportune moment to make territorial gains to advance international Communism. Toward this end, Stalin helped Hitler gain power in Germany, and engaged in an intricate game of diplomacy during the 1930s. While Tucker criticizes this policy, history shows us that despite the fact that Stalin's plan did not go exactly according to his design (the German invasion of the Soviet Union was perhaps the single greatest setback to this plan) in the end, Stalin did succeed in spreading Communism throughout Eastern Europe as a result of Russia's involvement in World War II.
There is one other problem with Tucker's book, and that is the lack of footnotes. Footnotes or endnotes would help readers to better evaluate the reliability of Tucker's. assertions, including his psychological analysis of Joseph Stalin, and Stalin's diplomacy.
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