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Loading... Stalin: A Biographyby Robert Service
None.  RobertDay | Dec 28, 2011 |  Very interesting and convincing portrait. I wish it would be a little more compressed. (  ) everfresh1 | Jan 21, 2011 | Robert Service does not write easy books. He uses a lot of difficult words (especially if English is not your native language). Thankfully he gets the point across regardless. I have to say I'm happy I've read "Lenin" as well and before I started on "Stalin". Reading them in succession helps to complete the picture. Obviously some things will be mentioned in both books, but you do get a different point of view. This obviously adds to the overall story. Apparently there is not a lot of genuine information to be found on Stalin, but I get the idea that Robert Service managed to put together quite a bit in the end. I find the book very complete and it comes across as very honest. When I started reading both biographies I was just curious about Russia's political history and the significance of these two men. Being brought up in a pro-American society meant I simply didn't know much about them. It was quite a read, but well worth it if you want to get a good idea of the period from just before the October Revolution to somewhere in the fifties. ( ) nicky_too | Dec 2, 2010 | A good one volume biography of Stalin. I think this would be good to read in conjunction with Montefiore's Young Stalin and The Court of the Red Star, especially Young Stalin, which I thought had more detail although it might also have been the fact that Montefiore has more of a narrative approach. Together the three books really provide the lay person, like myself, who has a general interest in Stalin and his times with a good portrait. MAMP | May 14, 2008 | Here is a life-and-times biography in the grand style: deeply researched, well written, brimming with interpretations. Oxford historian Service, author of an acclaimed biography of Lenin, provides the most complete portrait available of the Soviet ruler, from his early, troubled years in a small town in Georgia to the pinnacle of power in the Kremlin. Most previous biographers have depicted Stalin as a plodding figure whose only distinguishing characteristic was brutality. But Service describes a man who was intelligent and hardworking, who learned from experience and who played an important role in the Russian revolutionary movement. On so many of the complex issues of Soviet history--including Stalin's rise to power within the Communist Party, the policy shift to forced collectivization, the Great Terror and the prosecution of the war against Nazi Germany--Service provides lucid accounts based on his own research and the most recent scholarship. Stalin was the key figure behind every major development from the mid-1920s onward. He based his policy decisions on his understanding of Marxism-Leninism and on a hardheaded, realistic assessment of his own often uneasy position and of the Soviet Union's relatively weak standing in the world. By providing such a rich and complex portrait of the dictator and the Soviet system, Service humanizes Stalin without ever diminishing the extent of the atrocities he unleashed upon the Soviet population.  antimuzak | Feb 25, 2007 | no reviews | add a review
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Wikipedia in English (18)
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More when I've actually read it...