Stalin
by Stephen Kotkin · first published 2014
56% recommend44% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Scholarly multi-volume biography that treats Stalin's rise through institutions and politics rather than melodrama; praised for depth and readability by readers wanting a serious account of the Soviet leader.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world. It has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler's son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia. While still building his power base within the Bolshevik dictatorship, he emba
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I really enjoyed the first volume of Kotkin’s Stalin biography, if you’re looking for something in a similar vein: https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Paradoxes-1878-1928-Stephen-Ko...
on “The legacies of 1917” ↗Stephen Kotkin (briefly referenced in the article) is a history professor at Princeton University and known as the leading Stalin scholar. He's written amazing books and has long interviews on the subject on youtube. One thing that stood out from his talks/books is that he proposes that Stalin was no a psychopathic killer (unlike…
on “A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books” ↗Here's a great interview with Stephen Kotkin, Princeton professor, about Stalin: http://www.hoover.org/research/hoover-fellow-stephen-kotkin-... . He was apparently a very charismatic and likable guy. The interview convinced me to buy the book.
on “Iran Complies with Nuclear Deal; Sanctions Are Lifted” ↗I read Stephen Kotkin's excellent three part series on Stalin this summer and Kotkin (who is by no means a Soviet apologist; he's a conservative) thinks Stalin was a political genius, a modern Machiavelli. For example, in this interview [1] he explains how Stalin's…
on “Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week and settle Mars” ↗Montefiore is a great one for telling the best story instead of the correct one. Much of his first book is based on sources known to be fabricated. I would recommend Kotkin's Stalin biography instead.
on “The Yugoslavian Leader Who Survived Waves of Stalin’s Assassins” ↗If you want something more extensive and less dramatized, I'd recommend Kotkin's ongoing multi-volume biography starting with Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. It's becoming (if it isn't already) the definitive work on Stalin.
on “Stalin's daughter on her life in Wisconsin (2010)” ↗It sort of reinforced the stereo types of how Stalin and his circle behaved. Stalin had psychopath traits, but what's shown in the film isn't remotely anything like how things may have happened. I highly recommend Stephen Kotkin's new 3-volume biography…
on “Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria” ↗Kotkin (of the New Yorker interview recently making the rounds, the Stalin bio, etc) wrote Armageddon Averted - one interesting and fairly brief summary.
on “How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London” ↗Powered thru Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin. How the Bolsheviks ended up in power is just such a ridiculous, improbable tale. Fantastic book. Super hard to read, given the current events here in…
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading, since when?” ↗You know people love rUsSiA iS nOt ThE sAmE aS uSsR. But having read "Stalin" by Stephen Kotkin I've concluded that the USSR was nothing more than a legal construction to increase Russian control over its neighbors.
on “ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026” ↗Please actually inform yourself about these things. > In any case, it doesn't matter, since Stalin created the Troika, ensured that Lenin was unable to contact outsiders without his authority This is at best an exaturation. Many non-Stalin allies had contact with Lenin during most of that time. >…
on “Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network (2008) [pdf]” ↗You're not joking. I'm reading thru "Stalin" by Stephen Kotkin, and Stalin was using the term "capitalist encirclement" at least as far back as the 1920s. I get the impression that Russian state police in its different incarnations (cheka/OGPU/KGB/GRU)…
on “Baltic GPS Jammer is in Kaliningrad–Fourth proof,refined dataset,second method” ↗…interview of Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton history professor. He's spent many years digging through Soviet archives and other primary sources and just published the first book of a two volume series about Stalin. One of the things that he found was that these people were actually Communists. It's easy and tempting for us to dismiss the Soviet Union as megalomaniacs that used Communist rhetoric for their own ends,…
on “East Germany thrived on snitching lovers, fickle friends and envious schoolkids” ↗Actually, that testament is hard to actually link to Lenin directly. There has been a lot of research on this and the document is extremely suspicious. Stephen Kotkin in his Stalin biography goes into a lot of detail on all aspects of the testament. Also, threw-out his career he went with Lenin and Lenin put him into the positions. Basically he had Lenins support all the way until…
on “Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network (2008) [pdf]” ↗I think that there are answers out there, many coming from Stephen Kotkin, a man who destroyed his eye sight studying Stalin, who is an expert on the collapse of the Soviet Union, and who is trying to reboot the American diplomatic service. He talks about how we in the west must stop demonizing each other. We have the ability…
on “I was wrong, we need crypto” ↗