Stalin [antikvár]

The present edition of Stalin contains a newly written section, in which I describe the last crowded and gloomy years of Stalin's rule. When I originally concluded this biography in the summer of 1948 I could not carry the story beyond the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Trying then to assess Stalin's career, I made the reservation that 'we do not know into what new perspective its last act may yet throw the preceding ones'. In the concluding pages of this edition I review the whole perspective with an eye to the final act of the drama and to its epilogue, the so-called de-Stalinization.I am sometimes asked whether I have revised my views on Stalin in the light of the 'revelations' made by Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and others at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 and later. I wish I could answer this question in the affirmative. Unfortunately, those revelations have added nothing to the account given in this book of Stalin's rise to power, of his relationship with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, of his policies in the inter-war period, and of the Great Purges. On all these crucial points my biography of Stalin contains abundant information, still inaccessible, even now, to Soviet readers. On the other hand, I do not accept Khrushchev's assertion that Stalin's role in the Second World War was virtually insignificant. This allegation was obviously meant to boost Khrushchev himself at Stalin's expense; and it does not accord with the testimonies of many reliable eye-witnesses, especially Western statesmen and generals, who had no reason to exaggerate Stalin's role. OnL aspect only of Stalin's activity has appeared to me in a clearer light as a result of Khrushchev's disclosures - namely, the extent to which Stalin, having suppressed the Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and Bukharinists, victimized his own followers, the Stalinists. In this edition I analyse the consequences of that important fact.Otherwise the original text of the biography is reproduced here as it was written nearly two decades ago. To make room for the