Stalin: The 1st In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive Documents from [Paperback]

Radzinsky meticulously chronicles the life of Stalin (born as Iosif Dzhugashvili in Georgia) from his troubled and rabble-rousing youth growing up in the Caucasus, to his life as a young revolutionary at Lenins side. Radzinsky writes that during those years, Stalin went through two transitions: one as Soso, the child, and as Koba, the revolutionary. With gripping narration, he chronicles how Stalin (his nom de guerre) scrambled for absolute power following the death of Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism.

What stands out in Radzinskys biography is not just the now-illuminated life of Stalin, which had deliberately been shrouded in mystery and speculation for fifty years, but more importantly the details of Stalins crimes. Although known for his complacency in mass murder during his years in power, both sympathizers and others that wanted to keep Stalins tyranny a secret never revealed the full extent of such crimes. Radzinsky chronicles them, and shows that this malevolent dictator was even more blood-crazed and paranoid than ever imagined. To Stalin, no human life was sacred, hence the atrocious scope of his show trials, liquidations and deportations to Siberia.

A perfect example of Stalins culpability in massacre after massacre is the infamous killing at Katyn Forest, which Radzinsky does not date; the reader can be confused as to the precise date, which was in the fall of 1939, in the wake of Hitlers invasion of Poland. About 20,000 Polish prisoners were quartered in camps close to the Soviet border, and when Stalin was later preparing a counterattack on Germany, he had them all massacred in a forest in Katyn, balking at the idea of having so many potential enemies within his grasp. He later released some two thousand Polish prisoners from other camps, trying to hide his culpability, but Poles abroad kept wondering how so many thousands of soldiers had just vanished. The answer given was that they had run away from the camps at the beginning of the war (p. 498). In the presence of a Polish representative, Stalin playacted that Poles from all Soviet prisons had been released. When the Germans occupied Smolensk, they found evidence of a massacre at Katyn and the decayed (and shot) remains of the Polish officers. Stalin changed the story altogether: accusing Hitler of provocation, he said the Poles had not run off, but had been transferred to Smolensk to build, where it was made to believe that the Germans caught them and shot them. In all, it became known that 21,857 Poles had been massacred. (pp. 498-499). The Germans were the first ones to be blamed for the killings, without surprise, but Stalin was the true architect from the very beginning. All documents on the Katyn massacre were ordered destroyed by Khrushchev in 1959, though some had evidently been overlooked, and preserved.

Katyn is one instance of many in Stalins years in power. If anything, Radzinskys biography serves to hold Stalin accountable for the terror he inflicted and to let the truth be known, for the sake of those lives lost under Stalin. On pp. 3-4, in Radzinskys Prologue, he symbolically refers to a statue of Stalin overlooking the Volga canal, in which many slave laborers died digging and building it. Birds would gather on the statues head and leave droppings, so the caretaker of the statue decided to electrify the statue, and every morning afterwards would come to clean the tiny bodies of birds littered around the statue. While the statue, cleansed of bird droppings, gazed out on the great expanse beyond the Volga, fertilized by the bodies not of birds but of human beings, by the unmarked graves of those who had built the great canal (p. 4). Oh the irony...

The book seems to have a few points:
1. Stalin was a monster.
2. Stalin still saved the world from the Nazis because he relied on Orthodox Russian nationalism.
3. The Russians are the strongest people in the world.
4. Russia will never be able to get true help or friendship from the West.
5. Russia must rely on its orthodox nationalism to win.

I should tell you I lived in Russia for some time, and I have a good knowledge of Russian history. Further, books of this kind simply do not get published without some political sponsorship. This book was published in 1996 during the presidential campaign in Russia and should be seen in this light - it is more a statement about current Russian political thought than real history.
Bashing the achievements of the West is still good politics and business in Russia. Another book published in the last few years gave 'scientific evidence' how NASA faked the moonlandings. As a result, most Russians younger than 40 do not believe that man walked on the moon. Indeed, this has resulted in some comedy between my friends and myself.
Please, if you insist on reading this book do not read it in a vacuum. I could write a list pages long on factual mistakes in the book, but see for yourself. The last 100 pages, especially the chapters on WWII, are exceptionally bad. I do not believe these errors were accidents - as I stated, this book is more a comment about current Russian politics than Stalin, and anyway, there are too many mistakes to be random. Its a crime, actually: both the subject and the country deserve better.