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Stalin: Passage to Revolution
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About This Book
A spellbinding new biography of Stalin in his formative years This is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators. In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career, bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin's early years in the Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged with some of the most incendiary debates of his time. A landmark achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.
Reviews
"Without dipping too deeply into psychobiography, the author examines aspects of his home life that might have influenced his emergent defensiveness, and later paranoia ..."
"Above all, Suny knows Georgia ..."
"Suny, a history professor at the University of Michigan, tells the story of the young Stalin's rise within the ranks of the Bolsheviks, its disputes with the more moderate Mensheviks, and his frequent arrests and terms of imprisonment and exile ..."
"Suny carefully blends casual episodes in Stalin's early life with the grand narrative of the Soviet Union in early 20th-century Russia."
"University of Michigan history professor Ronald Grigor Suny has written a massive, extensively researched biography of Josef Stalin's early years."
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