For 50 years, few have disputed that Stalin was one of the cruelest men since Vlad the Impaler and his own contemporary, Adolf Hitler. It's an interesting footnote that, long after his death, we have people bearing signs that read, "Jews Beware! Stalin Will Soon Return!"

His reign of terror is remarkable in that he was able to slaughter so many while at the same time maintaining a public façade of "Uncle Joe," the merciful one. One can only speculate on what drove so paranoid a lunatic into the games he played with human lives and how he so coldly turned his back and partied during the starvation of his people. A horrifying example is the amusement with which he would dispose of wives and family members merely to "send a message" to his henchmen--and then killed them anyway.

I have read of Stalin before the fall of the Soviet Union and the release of many of the archives that led to this book--while he was known to have murdered so many, reading Radzinsky's exploration of the files leaves one utterly repulsed at so ugly an animal. May his example give us the strength to topple such madmen in the future.

Well it was a very interesting book. But sadly this book didn't make me want to hate Stalin any more then I used to. In fact it only made me want to understand him more! Now I'm not going to lie, I like the guy a lot. But I have very mixed feelings about Stalin. Part of me admires him deeply, while the other half despises what he did to those poor Russians, Ukranians, Georigans, Eastern Europeans, ect..... But did it even accure to the author of the book that mabye Stalin was trying to act more Russian then Georgian due to the fact that his country was a part of the Russian empire when he was a child? And did it accure to him that maybe in some kind of way those Russians perhaps made him feel a little ashamed of being Georigan? Heck it wouldn't suprise me. After all it seems to me like this guy was trying to act more Russian then his own nationality. I say the guy should do a little more research about Stalin! Even if it kills him!

This book does have a lot of information and does provide some unique insights into the personality of Stalin, but it suffers in several ways:
1. The author tends to jump from one time period to another and it is sometimes difficult to tell exactly where in time an event took place.
2. It occasionally has some awkward sentence structures. This may be a result of translation.
3. The author used the pronoun "I" much more than what I have seen in other biographies. In other words he places myself in the action or explains how he got some information.
4. At times it reads more like a mystery spy novel than a biography. He would end a paragraph with a question instead of a declarative statement.
5. Except for the main characters, the long and un-pronounceable Russia names made it very hard to follow exactly who he was talking about.

This is a literate and dramatic telling of Stalin's life and times from birth to death. The knowns and unknowns of Stalin are covered, as well as his colleagues (or adverseries in Stalin's case). The author's style is literary - a playwright by vocation - as if writing a novel. So, yes, there are the usual cliffhanger chapter endings and is suspensful to a degree - - a definite page turner overall. Also, the author is a native who lived part of his childhood during the Stalin era and his father felt the full brunt of Stalinism. So I like the touch of the personal emotion here. Is more readable and personable than the Conquest and Service bios, and covers more time than Montefiore. I heartily recommend.

Of all the Stalin books, this is the best one by far. I strongly recommend it.

I m not a big fan of communism, nor of Stalin. But I cross checked the facts mentioned in this book with facts in some other books I have read on similar subject and found that author Edvard Radzinsky is strongly biased against Stalin. In the entire book he seems to give no credit for anything to Stalin nor to his leadership qualities during the course of Second World War. Dont waste your money on a propaganda book. Better to go for an unbiased account from a neutral observer, thats what Biographies are supposed to be.

I m not a big fan of communism, nor of Stalin. But I cross checked the facts mentioned in this book with facts in some other books I have read on similar subject and found that author Edvard Radzinsky is strongly biased against Stalin. In the entire book he seems to give no credit for anything to Stalin nor to his leadership qualities during the course of Second World War. Dont waste your money on a propaganda book. Better to go for an unbiased account from a neutral observer, thats what Biographies are supposed to be.

This is one of the most interesting biographies that I have ever read. It should be, as the author is also a successful Russian playwright, and he is not inexperienced at writing biographies. Combine this talent for researching and telling dramatic stories with the fact that the author had privileged access to formerly top-secret archives of the Soviet Union, and the ingredients are there for the compulsive read that it is.

Radzinsky makes it clear just how little is known about Stalin's early years. Nevertheless, he considers various testimonies and documents to offer several possibilities about the nature of each of his parents - an absent father and a poor, toiling mother. Considering similar kinds of evidence, and also painting a picture of how Georgia may have been like at the close of the 19th Century, the author also offers glimpses of a child who was always small, feisty, and yet natural as a leader.

His mother pressures him into going to a seminary school so that he may become an orthodox priest. However, this proves to be against a backdrop of various ideologies and revolutionaries, and so we can imagine the transition as Stalin goes from bright student, to atheist, and on to zealous terrorist who has no qualms about taking innocent lives for his ideals.

Stalin's rise to prominence is just as fascinating, in its own way, as Hitler's; but we don't only meet Stalin. We see a lot of Soviet history in the making, and we meet an array of colourful contemporaries along the way. The book is gripping as we read about revolutions, wars, civil wars, the rise and death of Lenin, and the rise of Stalin as he consolidates absolute power into his own hands. By now, we have already glimpsed just how un-human his heart can be, but that is only just the beginning in what is to become an all out attempt to eliminate all political rivals and all classes who may not conform to a system that promises a utopia built upon a foundation of human bones.

There is brief respite during WWII, where some power had to be given back to the generals. With this sense of relative freedom, and the victory over Nazi Germany, it seems as if for a while things will get better. However, as soon as the war is over, the time for independent thinkers is over, and it's back to purges, and then the purges of those who purged, once more.

Unfortunately, I could never really get a feel for how accurate some of the story was, as this is the first major biography on Stalin that I have read, and I have also read relatively little on Soviet history in general. Some reviewers praise this book, saying how they use it to teach their high-school students. Others attack it for being unfounded lies and propaganda. Having been a student of history for some while, I never got the sense that it was too much of the latter; but then I wouldn't be aware of some of the more technical points. Still, if like any other book it can't be assumed to be absolute fact, I continue to feel there has to be much to it that is fair.

Overall, I thought Radzinsky was clear about the fallibility of his explanations, and I always felt as if I were being allowed to draw my own conclusions. The only time that I really questioned the validity of some of his arguments was when it came to Radzinsky's interpretation of Stalin's death, and the seeming conclusion that one way or another Stalin was murdered. This was when at best it looked as if people had been slow to help him because he was not in his normal place to issue commands from the top; and at worst it looked like he may have suffered from a well-deserved dose of neglect. Neither of these possibilities would personally lead me to conclude 'murder'. Still, as I have said, I was able to reach this conclusion for myself, based on the fact that Radzinsky presented alternative evidence and that he was clear when his own conclusions were not absolute.

To sum up, this is a fascinating read; a real page-turner. The story seemed fairly balanced and accurate to me (but then I couldn't be certain). Nevertheless, it was very colourful and highly entertaining. I think it's a very recommendable book.

The research done in this book is solid. I read both Russian and English stories, articles, and even books on the recently (if you can call mid nineties that) opened archived by the FSB (then KGB).

Radzinsky does little to interfere with his opinion. He is solely the messenger here, the message is what has been rumored about, spoken of, conspired around, and basically shared in millions of dining rooms, "skomeyak" while old men played dominoes.

Most of what is projected to the reader has been known for some time, especially in Russia proper. Some of the most incredible finds are not really anything knew to most Russian; mainly those that read "Suvorov" back when he first made allegations that based on the numbers, his own eyes when documents passed him, that Stalin was, indeed, planning to attack Hitler first. The difference with Radzinsky and Suvorov, is the incentive.

These finds, of course, would be, and were met with outrage. Partisans would never want to submit they sacrificed so much just for some madman's play. The maginitude of personal destruction, farms, families, culture, religion, all for what? The more documents come to light, the more truth and evidence that this was, in fact, a very real possibility.

Radzinsky does an excellent job of sifting through a lot, picking up where there was little trace, and attempting to explain, as subtle as he can, the sheer magnificance of the issue.

Here we have an obviously biased but fantastic portrait of a ruthless dictator and the methods to the madness that consoladated and kept him in power for 3 decades. After reading this you will have a clearer picture of how dictatorships work in general, and how men like Sadam Hussein could use the same pattern of terror and constant purging to maintain control. In Stalin's world the idealogy of marxism became simply a macheovelian ploy to subdue the masses, any shred of emotion or decency is used against you, empathy and caring are as good as death certificates.

Radzinsky, already renowned as a playwright and biographer has, an entertaining writing style and is not afraid to propose new theories based on his tireless research. The Cover claims that the book is based on 'explosive new documents from Russia's secret archives' and it does not dissapoint in that regard. With all the disinformation and revisionism that occured in the Soviet archives, piecing together a coherrent story must have been exceedingly difficult. However Radzinsky makes compelling cases for the assination of Stalin by Beri, Krushcev et al. with the knowledge of the leaders of the politburo among other things. My question is why did it take so long to take him out!!! Also fascinating is his portrayal of Molitov, the genius brown-noser who could not make even the simplest decision without direct advice from the leader, who mindlessly signed off on atrocities, and even regretted abstaining from voting that his own wife to be purged(though admittedly he may have saved his life in doing so)! If people like Molotov are the only kind that can survive in your organization it might be a good idea to look elsewhere if you have a choice.

My main criticism of the book would be that it spends a couple of hundred pages describing theories behind hunderds of political killing and it becomes skimmingly redundant. We see the planning and strategy behind the first and second major purges. Sergei Kirov a war hero who was killed for being popular, and how the 'mystery' behind is death is turned around and used against all of Stalin's enemies and competitiors.
The heplessness of politial rivals such as Trotsky and paticularly of Bukharrin where we get the text of several letters he wrote while on death row, unable to come to terms with the ruthlessness of his foe. Though mortal political manuevering is despisable, the major tragedy here is in the collectivazation of the peasentry and the destruction of their culture, and the starvation that it caused when they were forced to make steel instead of wheat. Not enough emphasis is put on that. We do however get a good sense of the grip of terror on the entire society where everything is sensored, from a letter to your cousin or an innocent conversation on a train, and where govt agents frequently come and take whole families away seemingly at random in the middle of the night for the slightest preceived offense. In this we see the difficulty and time it would take to have a productive democracy in a place like Iraq or even China.

Reading Macheaveli's 'The Prince' is a rather tiresome intellectual exercise, but with Stalin we see it put into action with devestating results.
From this I get a tangible sense of why it is never a good idea to consolidate power into the hands of the very few. Though there may be a few good kings out there, eventually you will get a Nero, Stalin, etc. As flawed as it may be, any political system which flollows peaceable transfer of power over short intervals with an open press and right of protest is vastly, vastly superior to indeffinate dictatorship with absolute power.
For comparison I would say this books ranks as high as the fantastic autobiography of the clever Nazi, Albert Speer.