cover image Stalin: 2breaker of Nations

Stalin: 2breaker of Nations

Robert Conquest. Viking Books, $25 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-670-84089-2

Drawing on a wealth of new material from the Soviet Union, Conquest presents a chilling portrait of a mass murderer who gave personal instructions on how his victims should be tortured. Stalin (1879-1953), a rebellious young seminarian who wrote poetry, would later have poets executed. Conquest ( The Great Terror ) portrays the Soviet dictator as an insufferably rude husband, a Georgian who hated his roots and Russified himself, a crude boor who yearned to be a backslapping man of the people. Although omitting intricate political details and focusing instead on the person himself, this masterful biography provides fresh insight into a progressively paranoid leader who ruled by terror and falsification, deported millions to slave labor camps, engineered the famine of 1932 that killed some five million Ukrainians, and launched an anti-Semitic campaign of murders and arrests. Photos. (Nov.)