A Landmark biography of Stalin

Joseph Stalin decided that the largest peasant economy in the world would be transformed into socialist modernity, as he managed to force through using profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with power of life or death over hundreds of millions, in conditions of capitalist self-encirclement. Stalin never forgot and never forgave, with bloody consequences and he consolidated the state with new elite.

The second volume of Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Joseph Stalin, captures global events and intimate details of decision making, starts with the evening of November 13, 1940, in a bunker beneath the German foreign ministry in Berlin. Nazi Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, read out a proposal to his visiting Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov, formally inviting Soviet Union to join the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan, Von Ribbentrop offered to carve up the world between them. The year before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was concluded, leading to dismemberment of Poland and the outbreak of Second World War. Soviet Union after swallowing eastern Poland, annexed three Baltic states and chunks of Romania and Finland. Stalin’s idea was that force could be the “midwife of revolution”, although he was determined to avoid war with Germany at all costs.

Molotov Ribbentrop from his Berlin bunker said about the forthcoming liquidation of the British Empire “ If England is defeated, why are we sitting in this shelter? And whose bombs are dropping so close that we can hear the explosions even here?”

 The failure to clinch the deal mostly due to Stalin overplaying his hand persuaded Hitler to go ahead with the invasion of the Soviet Union the following year. If the deal had gone through the British Empire could not have held out for long against a united and hostile Eurasian landmass. In fact, had it not been for Stalin’s miscalculations and Hitler’s unruliness, the world would have been ruled by a hellish totalitarian vice for decades.

Kotkin presented Stalin as a human being and hard working ruthless and coldly calculating tyrant. “Stalin emerged as the leader of acute political intelligence and bottomless personal resentment”.

 Stalin revived a great power, building on industrialised military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone surrounded by perceived enemies. The lives of Hitler and Stalin, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew even closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance. Stalin: waiting for Hitler is a history of the world during the build up to its most fateful hour from Stalin’s seat of power.

Kotkin, portrays Stalin’s human foibles, physical deformities and maladies , his barely usable left arm, the two webbed toes on his left foot and his addiction to Herzegovina Flor cigarette tobacco that stained his teeth and moustache yellow, and his diarrhoea. Stalin devotion to literature and gardening. His personal library contained 20, 000 books.

 Stalin Vol II Waiting for Hitler 1928-1941 by Stephen Kotkin, Allen Lane £30/ $40, 1,184 pages