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: #1005963 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.

Ingram
The author had an incredible access to secret KGB files in his role as historian for the Soviet Army. 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. Photos.

Customer Reviews

The beginning
You will not find a very well written biography. The author is not a writer. Is something like and historician. A second-rate politician starring a great historical period (perestroika) that writes about great men of the Revolution, running through a lot of documentation now known about them.
Surely, there will be better works in the future. More findings, more data. This is the beginning. You've got to read it because, if you do this, then will understand better your future readings.

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.

A biography more suited to historians than thegeneral reader
Gen. Volkogonov is not a professional historian, and certainly not a great writer. His work his well researched and meticolous, but is fails to either capture the general reader or to impress the reader looking for a clear analysis of causes and consequences. The book is very long, the style of prose quite boring and at times repetitive. The author very often has a moralistic tone ("How could Stalin posssibly be so cruel? Look how corrupt his cronies were...") that bothers those who would like a more detached approach. I guess one has to remember that once he believed in Communism and cannot have helped being shocked by what he found in the state's archives (where he ventured with the original purpose of writing an orthodox biography of the Great Leader); this might explain his being upset at Stalin, but does not make the book more appealing. In the end, Gen. Volgokonov's main merit is exactly this: to have been able to access, thanks to his position in the Red Army, the USSR's impenetrable archives, and to have revealed to the world a deluge of details and documents. Some of them are immensely controversial in their potential consequences (eg the statements made by Stalin before the German attack that war was inevitable; or Zukov's plan for a preventive strike against Germany). Indeed, this book deservedly appears in most bibliographies on the USSR and the Russo-German war, and has provided the academic community with valuable insights for further analysis on Stalin and Stalinism. But it is probably more suited for an historian than for a general reader.