Rating: 
Summary: Engaging style for distasteful subject
Review: Has it ever struck you how durable certain myths in public life are? I'm thinking concretely of the myth that holds Nazi Germany to have been the supreme catastrophe of our century. Even now, more than fifty years after his total defeat, judging by Hollywood's near obsessive treatment of the subject, one would almost feel justified in swearing that Herr Hitler was still master of Festung Europa, and a real threat to all of us! Edvard Radzinsky's book, however, makes it clear that Hitler was strictly an understudy in the dubious totalitarian arts of police terror, mass murder, and rewriting history. Stalin was the master criminal of our time, indeed of all times. His murderous gaze spared no one, not stranger, nor friend, nor even close family. Had the Austrian criminal been as ruthless, there would have been no trials at Nuremberg; all the defendants would have died at their master's hand long before 1946. For those not blinded by the silly leftist slogan of pas d'enemis a gauche, none of this is news. Still, there are revelations in this biography. One of the most important is Radzinsky's inference that Stalin intended to touch off a third and final world war, designed to bring communism to power around the globe, and that he planned this mother of all battles for the early 1950s. Only his death at the hands of his own Politburo comrades saved Western Europe and America from a thermonuclear clash with the Red Army. The evidence for this inference is substantial: a massive rocket air defense system around Moscow, near completion in 1953; a successful crash catch-up program to develop a portable hydrogen bomb (greatly advanced, of course, by efforts of the numerous traitors honeycombing the Roosevelt administration, and then inherited by Truman); a massive terror campaign, this time directed at Soviet Jews, similar to the campaign leading up to WWII in the late '30s; Stalin's own warlike intentions expressed to Molotov just after the Great Patriotic War. This would seem to be fertile ground for further investigation. Some questions immediately suggest themselves: Was the USSR really capable of delivering hydrogen weapons at that time? Were there, or could there have been produced, enough such bombs to make them a credible threat? Had the Red Army maintained the effectiveness it evinced at the end of the preceding conflict? Radzinsky's portrait of Stalin, a man of near preternatural determination, makes me suspect all these questions can be answered in the affirmative. The author's style is fast-paced and engaging as a mystery writer's. He knew some of the players personally and doesn't hesitate to shed light on events from this angle. As in his previous book, The Last Tsar, he lets the diaries and recollections of first-hand participants and observers tell large parts of the story. As I finished the biography, several questions kept recurring to me: How could the U.S. ever have allied itself with this odious murderer, regardless of the mutual enemy? How could the American left not be eternally embarrassed by the large role it played in furthering the aims of Stalin's wretched regime, by the admiration and friendship lavished on him by left wing icons like Roosevelt? And, finally, will we ever live to see the day a dictator like Hussein is generally branded 'a Stalin' rather than 'a Hitler'?
Rating: 
Summary: Prepare to be shocked.
Review: It is difficult to read a book on Stalin and have no opinion of him. On the one hand, Stalin holds the world's all time record on murder, and on the other, who could have stood up to Hitler as the Iron man Stalin did (Stalin meaning Iron in the Russian language)? But this book is intriguing in a different way, you learn that Stalin Loved his mother, was hurt by his wife's suicide, and that he was most probably murdered or left to die when he could have been saved in a hospital. But the reason for the murder is the real shocker in this book. He was about to start World War 3!!! I feel there are too many claims that are somewhat weak. I'm not much of a Soviet expert, but I have read quite a few history books and my sense was that there were too many claims that were supported by barely a thread of evidence. Maybe it is because these claims are so revolutionary that I feel we need more support for them. I'd like to see the sources and a few other Soviet experts inspect these claims before I accept them as fact. Still, the book is well written and well translated. It is thorough and very interesting.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best biographies that I have ever read
Review: This story reads like an intense novel full of ghastly crimes, murders, intrigue and insight into the sick mind who pulled off so much death and destruction. The author is a great writer with a great sense of humour that actually had me bursting out laughing at times. I was not able to put this book down when I picked it up. That is how good it is. If you like non-dry fiction that reads like a good fictional novel, get this book!
Rating:
Summary: Revealing biography of a mass murderer
Review: I read this book over a year ago, yet the images it conveys still disturb me. First recommended to be by an uncle, I read it to further understand why and how Communism acquired such a nasty reputation, and it did not take long to learn that Joseph Stalin was the focal point behind this 'bad rap.' Even though this book is a translation from Russian, it reads and flows well; Radzinsky is an excellent writer. His book first appeared in 1996, almost in the form of a breakthrough, because it used newly declassified Russian documents on Stalin, who took every effort in purging archives (and people) in keeping his life and details a secret. 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 Lenin's 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 Radzinsky's 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 Stalin's crimes. Although known for his complacency in mass murder during his years in power, both sympathizers and others that wanted to keep Stalin's 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 Stalin's 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 Hitler's 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 Stalin's years in power. If anything, Radzinsky's 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 Radzinsky's 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 statue's 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...
Rating:
Summary: A suspenseful bio - a rare treat
Review: This book packs a lot of communist history into an intriguing bio. Did you know Stalin was a Czarist spy? Did you know his approach to terror was an implementation of Lenin's theories and orders? Did you know he was starting another Jewish holocaust in the early '50s as a provocation to world war III with the West and justification for further terror behind the Iron Curtain? I didn't until I read/listened to this book. On top of all this, David McCallum's reading is the best I've ever heard by one man working alone. He ratchets up the suspense to higher and more chilling levels with only his voice. True, the book on tape uses background music in some places, but it's McCallum's skills as an orator that will have you unable to get of your car, sitting in your driveway, waiting to hear how Stalin commits another atrocity in the name of a utopian society.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling, fascinating and instructive
Review: Josef Stalin's 30-plus-year reign of terror makes Adolf Hitler's 12-year Reich look like a child having a temper tantrum.
Radzinsky's book is an excellent biography of a truly evil man who caused the deaths of millions of his own countrymen. He wiped out an entire class of semi-prosperous peasants and engaged in ethnic cleansing before the term was coined. He was planning to eliminate the remaining Jews in the Soviet Union and launch World War III at the time of his death in 1953.
As one only casually acquainted with the cast of characters and chronology of the 1918 revolution and its aftermath, I found this book an excellent introduction to the horrors visited upon the people of the USSR.
Of particular interest is Radzinsky's assertion that Stalin planned to strike the first blow in his war with Germany. He was beaten to the punch when the Führer did the unexpected and plunged Germany into a two-front war.
Anyone who has ever had a sympathetic thought about communism or the Soviet system needs to read this book to comprehend the hideous truth.
It's one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century that the western democracies stood by while Stalin terrorized his nation and its neighbors for three decades.
If your knowledge of Stalin and the Soviet era is a little thin, this book will get you up to speed and prepare you for further reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Be careful if a book relies on "Explosive" New Documents
Review: The title: "The first in-depth biography based on explosive new documents from Russia's secret archives" should already give you a hint of what this book is like. The followings are the reasons why I did not particularly like it:
- Above all the book fails to tell a story. You would expect at least some development of characters and some interaction between them that would help you put all things in perspective. It is very user-unfriendly, names are introduced as the story goes by the hundreds, without regard to their importance with the rest of the story or their interconnection. Other authors provide you with mini-bios of the secondary participants to help you put them in perspective and understand their importance, but Radzinsky, I guess, assumes that you already know those facts in advance. I started writing down the names of the characters but some of those names were mentioned only once throughout the whole book and others were mentioned in different parts without much sequence, so at one point I decided to stop doing it because my list wasn't helping me much. The author doesn't give you any clues as to the level of importance of the characters that keep popping up in the story.
- When I finish reading a biography I expect to have, among other things, a very good "picture" in my mind of the main subject: what was his personality like, how did he reacted in different circumstances, what was his voice like, his manners, gestures, sense of humor, hobbies interests. This helps me understand why and how that person did certain things and he managed to change history and influence people. This book does not do a good job in developing the Stalin persona; the references to these details are only very indirect and shallow. For instance it only makes one reference to the fact that he was a workaholic, and that's it, it doesn't go any further. I guess Radzinsky also assumes that you also know those details in advance.
- Another disappointment was that the book offers little in terms of big-picture understanding of the Russian situation and world history in general. He makes only superficial remarks in terms of the economic development of the country or its place and influence in world history. Throughout the book there are very little (if any) statistical hard facts. I did not end up with a good idea of what Stalin's final overall legacy to Russia was. I guess the author doesn't consider these facts to be important.
To summarize, I would not recommend this book if you don't know much of Stalin himself or Russian history. Its primary concern is to go into the intricacies of Stalin's ways to get rid of his comrades and all the sordid details of treason and intrigue.
Rating:
Summary: The Soviet Union's Man of Steel
Review: Joseph Stalin was the man America feared most after the demise of Hitler. Edvard Radzinsky gives us an indepth look at the life of Stalin. Many of the revelaions of this book were interesting and at times, hard to swallow. This is truly a great look at Stalin's life. Radzinsky begins the book in Stalin's childhood. Much of his childhood is mysterious because his parents's may not be truly known in addition to the fact that Stalin altered his birthday. Stalin evolves from studying for a life in the ministry to following the radical beliefs of Lenin. With Stalin following close behind, Lenin would create a government that was based on the ideas of Karl Marx, but more closely resembled a facist regime. After Lenin's death, Stalin would become the leader of the Soviet Government. During his tenure, he would kill more Russians than any Russian War. He would murder his enimies and murder his allies once he suspected a threat of discontent. He even ordered his own son to be murdered once he suspected his son betrayed his country. The book also discusses the belief that Stalin murdered his second wife. Radzinsky spent too little time discussing Stalin's effects on World War II. The author does discuss Stalin's support for Hitler in the hope that Hitler might spur the revolution that would end capitalism. There is little time spent on Stalin's relationship with Roosevelt and Churchill. This disappointed me. The circumstances of Stalin's death are discussed at length. The suggested cause of Stalin's death is murder. Khrushchev is the most likely perpetrator based on the evidence. What is unknown is the circumstances that let up to Stalin's demise. Did a brain hemorrhage in Stalin cause Khrushchev to take measures to end Stalin more quickly? Was Khrushchev just trying to prevent Stalin's attempts at a Soviet war against Soviet Jews? These matters are discussed at length. The only problem I had with the book is Radzinsky's tendancy to leave his topic. He goes for pages discussing important matters in Russian History which do not directly involve Stalin. This is a tendancy in all of Radzinsky's books based on the reviews I have read.
Rating:
Summary: History written in lyrical style.
Review: This book combines lyrical storytelling and a historical study in an epic way. The author creates a believable and chilling portrait of the one of most prominent persons of the last century. The book shows the corruptive and destructive results of unrestricted power without moral boundaries. The human suffering behind the events described in the book make reading it a frightening and even a sickening experience. I highly recommend this book to any reader interested in the history or the nature of the mankind.
Rating:
Summary: Stalin's Crimes Exposed
Review: Radzinsky has presented an extensively researched and well-documented book on Josef Stalin's rise to power and his 25 year
bloody reign in the USSR. I was surprised by the sheer number of "Comrades" that were eliminated by Stalin, simply to instill
fear into the lives of all Soviet citizens. While the true death toll will never be known for sure, upwards of 20 million
of his own people were killed in order to appease "The Boss".
Radzinsky provides only glimpses of his children (mostly Svetlana) and his family life, but comments extensively on Stalin's close associates such as Molotov and Beria. The author's speculation regarding Stalin's uncharacteristic behavior when Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941, and the mediocre performance of his armies leaves me wanting to know more about this time period (what if Moscow had fallen to the Nazis?) On the other hand, the sheer number of names and personalities presented in this work is overwhelming to those with only casual interest in Stalin's life. Perhaps the most telling event in Stalin's life was Radzinsky's account of how he lay dying in his room alone, for hours, because his comrades were so fearful of disturbing him and doctors were so fearful of treating him, that they dared not even knock on his door to
see why he had not arisen. (Was he poisened and deliberatly left to die a wretched death?) Ironically, Stalin's final pogram against Soviet Jews was scheduled to begin on the day he died - 3/5/53.
Thanks to Edvard Radzinsky for reminding us of who Stalin really was - even though we may never know why he was one the worst murders of recorded history.
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