Donald Rayfield
A Dictator’s Progress
Stalin, Vol II: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941
By Stephen Kotkin
Allen Lane 1,154pp £35 order from our bookshop
In the thousand or so pages Stephen Kotkin devotes to the central period of Stalin’s career, when he destroyed Soviet society and then tried to resurrect it in his own image, when he rid himself of enemies, real or imaginary, and prepared (or failed to prepare) for an apocalyptic war, the reader will find everything that is covered in two to three hundred pages in most of the recent biographies of Stalin by Russian, British and American scholars. In the last fifteen years, Russian archives have become harder to access and have acquired relatively little that is new, so the size of this volume is only partly due to new research: Kotkin has looked at fifty-five microfilms of declassified documents first used by Dmitri Volkogonov over twenty years ago but neglected by subsequent researchers for material on Stalin’s relationship with the armed forces and security services; he has diligently used peripheral sources overlooked by others, such as OGPU records for Khabarovsk in Russia’s far east. Mostly, however, the size of this second volume of his biography of Stalin, as with the first instalment, is due to Kotkin’s one-stop-shop approach, surveying and summarising all world history in the course of his narrative.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Humanity is inextricably bound up with the seas and oceans, which were used for communication and trade but also for war and the determined exploitation of peoples and resources.'
@margarettelinc1 on a global history of the seas and oceans.
http://ow.ly/CL8850xqzLH
'There is a chilling moment as he describes a gun hovering over him as its holder tries to make up his mind as to whether Lançon is dead or alive.'
Andrew Hussey reviews Philippe Lançon's extraordinary first-hand account of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
http://ow.ly/3M8E50xqqrE
Tales from the New Bedlam: my piece on Tim Etchells' ENDLAND in the current Literary Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/tales-from-the-new-bedlam via @Lit_Review There's a paywall but the first bit's free . . .