First para: Do new biographies of the dictator provoke deeper analysis of the Soviet
system? Will the life of Stalin open up new ways of understanding Stalinism?
Past experience, it has to be said, raises doubts. Of all the biographies of Stalin,
few have integrated, much less altered, the state of the art in Soviet history.1
The main reason for this fact also explains why so many Stalin biographies
get written: they sell. The temptation is perennial for semilearned amateurs
to pen sensationalist blockbusters. More sober-minded academic biographies,
when written by those focused on the leader more than the system, tend to
elide the much more difficult conceptual questions of how Stalin shaped—
and, crucially, was shaped by—first revolutionary Russia and then the broader
Soviet political system, culture, and ideology
