Just when you thought it was safe to go to the U.N., Russian poet and historian Edvard Radzinsky gains access to Russia’s secret archives and paints a portrait of former Soviet leader Josef Stalin that is more calculating, ruthless, and bloodthirsty than ever before portrayed. Angry, bitter and personally driven, Radzinsky’s Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives is sweeping in tone and force.
Despite Radzinksy’s obvious personal drive in this work, his first-hand account of a period in which he lived and his access to formerly closed archives lends great credibility to his portrait of a man Lenin said was “too rude” to take over. Nevertheless, Stalin was the logical extension of Marxism and Leninism and Radzinsky’s purpose is to portray the brutal leader warts and all. Radzinksy, a historian with a poet’s soul, argues that Stalin was a terrorist. He documents the leader’s long association with terror and how his desire for ultimate power definitely made him into a man whose ends were worth any means. Still, Radzinksy knows the enormity of his subject in history and uses his poetical/historical skills to announce the birth of Stalin via comparison with Prometheus lore, “This boy would play with the terrestrial globe as Amican had played with his stone ball” (Radzinsky 20).
In the modern error with terrorists like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein using tactics as brutal as anything Stalin ever devised, perhaps Radzinsky’s most important and significant point in this book is his ability to show Stalin as the menace that he was. He is able to do so by using restricted archive material that shreds many of the lies and unclothes the propaganda that was Stalin. In a chilling disclosure, he likens Stalin’s plans for the Jews to ones eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s explanation to the Jewish people why Jews were a threat to Germany, “The si...