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: #1736008 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-01
• Original language: Russian
• Binding: Hardcover
• 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.