Stalin - by Ronald Grigor Suny

About the Book

"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"This is Suny's magnum opus, the product of decades of scholarly research."---Duncan Bowie, Chartist

"

This impressively researched biography provides remarkable and reliable details on the first part of Stalin's life, along with the many fissures among the Left Communists. An important accomplishment.

"-- "Library Journal, starred review"

"A comprehensive, deeply researched study of one of the world's most brutal dictators as he took the paths that would lead him to power."---Starred Review, Kirkus

"A Georgianist as well as a Russianist, equally comfortable with social, cultural and political history, Suny outclasses previous biographers of the young Stalin . . . It is a monumental work of history and its treatment and evocation of the young Stalin will never be bettered."---Geoffrey Roberts, Literary Review

"He [Suny] is a lucid writer and a perspicacious scholar."---Stephen Lovell, Times Literary Supplement

"Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, ASEEES"

"Joseph Stalin has been the subject of many biographical studies. . . . Ronald Grigor Suny's 'Stalin: Passage to Revolution' is a worthy contribution to this continuing enterprise. . . . In highly readable prose Mr. Suny . . . tells the story of the young Stalin's rise."---Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal

"Ronald Grigor Suny has created a detailed and unbiased biography of the first half of Joseph Stalin's life. . . . one of the best on its subject."---Maria Timofeeva, International Journal of Military History and Historiography IJMH

"Ronald Grigor Suny has written a massive, extensively researched biography of Josef Stalin's early years--from his childhood days in Gori, Georgia, to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917."---Francis P. Sempa, New York Journal of Books

"Suny, using an abundance of newly available archival material, though there was no secret diary or introspective documents, provides an extraordinary telling, a detailed account, well written and engrossing, of the obscure and multiple layers of experience in Stalin's early life: church school, seminary, outlaw, exile, prison, attraction to Marxism."---Michael Curtis, American Thinker

"The book's strength lies . . . in its excavation of important episodes of the early years. . . . What I took from Passage to Revolution -- and I agree with the idea -- is that young Stalin was an angry optimist. . . . His hefty, demanding tome emphasizes the effects of changing circumstances that pivoted both Stalin and Russia into a vortex of revolution and civil war."---Robert Service, Washington Post

"The overriding merit of this book is that it takes Stalin seriously. It explains his life and development without feeling the need to impose a value judgement on the reader on every page."---Andrew Murray, Morning Star

"Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize, Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn trust"

About the Author

Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and professor emeritus of political science and history at the University of Chicago. His many books include "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else" A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton) and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.