Stalin: A Biography

In this acclaimed biography, Robert Service brings us closer than ever to an understanding of one of the most notorious figures in world history. Drawing on unpublished material from the Moscow archives, personal testimonies and private papers, this book illuminates the man as well as the dictator, placing him truly in the frame of his politics, party and revolution.
With unprecedented detail, Service describes Stalin's formative influences - his alcoholic father and devout mother, his Georgian origins, his religious training and his embrace of revolutionary Marxism - and shows how they shaped his later life as a Bolshevik militant, rising party chief and ruthless despot.
More importantly, Service ties together Stalin's political intellect, his voracious reading and surprising fondness for composing poetry with his penchant for glory, revenge and mass murder. Accounts of Stalin have been mythologized and distorted, but Robert Service's painstaking research and thirty-year engagement with his subject has allowed him to write a magisterial, shocking and utterly compelling biography of this most extraordinary figure.
"Outstanding...will be read for decades." --London Sunday Times
"Service has written a masterly book...No one has shown in more convincing detail Stalin's evolution to the absolute power that corrupts absolutely." --Spectator
PARTIAL CONTENTS:
Part One: The Revolutionary Stalin as We Have Known Him. The Family. Schooling of a Priest. Poet & Rebel. Marxist Militant. The Party & the Caucasus. On the Run. Centre of the Party. Koba & Bolshevism. OSIP of Siberia. Return to Petrograd.
Part Two: Leader of the Party The Year 1917. October. People's Commissar. To the Front. Polish Corridor. With Lenin.
Part Three: Despot Ending the NEP. Terror-Economics. Ascent to Supremacy. Death of Madya. Ruling the Nations. Mind of Terror. Cult of Impersonality. Brual Reprieve.
Part Four: Warlord Approaches to War. The Devils SUP. Barbarossa. To the Death! Supreme Commander. The Big Three. Last Campaigns. Victory!
Part Five: The Imprerator Outbreak of the Cold War. Subjugating Eastern Europe. Stalinist Rulership. Policies & Purges. Emperor Worship. VOZHD & Intellectual. Ailing Despot. Death & Embalming. After Stalin.
Glossary. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index.