Let’s Talk About Stalin — The Biography You Have to Read
I wanted to take some time to recommend a biography on Stalin I read at the beginning of the semester; I am doing my MA at McGill university and I read this book for my reading course on Stalinism.
Oleg V. Khlevniuk’s book, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator portrays a unique picture of Joseph Stalin’s life, who has been mystified, deified, and revised from the time of his birth to the extent that it is difficult to demarcate truth from fabrication or falsehood.
That’s why his book is so important and why I firmly recommend it.
Khlevniuk’s Motivations
Khlevniuk’s intentions are to amend some of the distortions past historians had succumbed to when it came to writing on Stalin’s life and the impacts of the Soviet Union under his influence.
Khlevniuk also wishes to combat Stalin’s apologists who have been seeking to both justify and distort the events in celebration of Stalin. In their phrasing, Stalin is portrayed as a hero, who had to sacrifice the lives of Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians, Georgians, and countless other nationalities, including Russians, in the process of modernization. Khlevniuk puts that and other related praises of Stalin to doubt.
