Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...STALIN: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (600 pp.)-Isaac Deufscher-Oxford...
...Joseph Stalin, professional revolutionist, was exiled to Kureika, Siberia. At 35, he had given all of his adult years to underground Bolshevik work, and it seemed they had been spent in vain. To Olga Alliluyeva, his future mother-in-law, he wrote a letter thanking her for food parcels and asking only for a few picture postcards: "In this accursed country [of frozen tundras] I have been overcome by a silly longing to see some landscape, be it only on paper...
...This is Stalin's only available private letter, one of the few occasions when he is known to have indulged in spontaneous human sentiments. In later years he was not to waste much time with such "silly longings." As portrayed in Isaac Deutscher's painstakingly researched and austerely written biography, Stalin has spent most of his life cultivating a steel fagade and suppressing any public sign of human frailty or fraternity-proper training for a modern dictator with pretentions to omniscience...
...Power. Actually, no real biography of Stalin is yet possible. How did he feel when his lifelong colleagues were sentenced to death in the Moscow trials? What did he say when his treaty partner, Hitler, attacked Russia? No one in a position to speak freely knows, and until such questions are answered, all a biographer can do is to rework the public record. Biographer Deutscher, an ex-Communist who now writes for British weeklies, has done this with taste and scholarship. Though less exciting and brilliant than Trotsky's acrid biography of Stalin, Deutscher's book is more...
...Stalin was the one important Bolshevik who was not an intellectual, a fact which seems to have filled him with poisonous envy. The other leaders had reputations as brilliant writers and orators, he began as a clumsy writer and tepid speaker. But he thought of himself as a man of the people (his parents had been serfs) and a practical organizer who would transform the intellectuals' fantasies into reality. He concentrated on building a personal political machine-first in the underground and then in the Soviet state. In the end, he liquidated the intellectuals. Deutscher sees this...