Just like that
Sheila Fitzpatrick: Second-Guessing Stalin, 5 April 2018
Stalin, Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler, 1928-41
by Stephen Kotkin.
Allen Lane, 1154 pp., £35, October 2017,978 0 7139 9945 7 Show More
by Stephen Kotkin.
Allen Lane, 1154 pp., £35, October 2017,
“... Stephen Kotkin
’s Stalin is all paradox. He is pockmarked and physically unimpressive, yet charismatic; a gambler, but cautious; undeterred by the prospect of mass bloodshed, but with no interest in personal participation. Cynical about everyone else’s motives, he himself ‘lived and breathed ideals’. Suspicious of ‘fancy-pants intellectuals’, he was an omnivorous reader whose success in getting the Russian creative intelligentsia into line was ‘uncanny ... ”