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smajor711's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 rounded down bc the narration was killing me. But Stalin was all kinds of f’d up!
mattd97's review against another edition
5.0
Stalin: Breaker of Nations is an in-depth study about the Soviet Union's molding and most powerful man. It deals with his childhood in great detail. This detail is only surpassed by the amount of research done on his political maneuverings in the Communist Party. Though it can be a bit dull during the middle of the book, it is worth the read for anyone who is doing research on the USSR or Stalin.
thomasroche's review against another edition
5.0
Yes, his name really is Robert Conquest, and he really is the foremost English language Stalinologist. Gotta be careful not to say "Stalinist," see, that's a whole different thing. Anyway, Stalin: Breaker of Nations is his Stalin biography. It appears to be largely based on research that Conquest did for the 1968 work that made him the foremost English language Stalinologist, The Great Terror. That work was reissued in 1990 as The Great Terror: A Reassessment, at a time when the recently-opened archives of the Soviet Union were available under the "Glasnost" policy. They proved to support assertions that Conquest had made in the late '60s, when he was complained about by the left for overstating the scale of Stalin's crimes. Soviet documents, as it turns out, supported Conquest's view.
Interestingly, I've noticed a certain number of ideological complaints against Conquest, on the grounds that he's a conservative. Well, I'm not a conservative, even remotely, and all I can say is that from this volume (I have NOT read "The Great Terror"), Conquest seems to be at best middle-of-the-road. I guess from a Marxist perspective, that makes him conservative. Here in the United States, in modern parlance "conservative" means a whole different bunch of things to a whole different bunch of people. It seems to involve a lot of hating abortion and a lot of accusing Obama of being a socialist. That's not what conservative really means, and I assume that the people slinging that label at Conquest aren't accusing him of being a neocon along the lines of Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld; judging only from this book, he would be impossible to read as one of those. Conquest comes across as pretty neutral on whether Marxism is de facto a Good Thing, but I would surmise that he is, in broad terms, anti-Communist. Whoop-de-friggin'-do. To my mind, any Marxist who wants to attack Conquest on those grounds in order to rehabilitate Stalin, or to rehabilitate Stalin AT ALL, has a pretty long walk uphill...at least as far uphill as those shitbags on the right who occasionally try to say nice things about Hitler, just to "play devil's advocate." I invite those crypto-Marxist asshats to kindly fuck the fuck off. Some crimes are beyond ideology, and Stalin's history is filled with them. Any ideological lens that excuses any of Stalin's crimes is the ideological lens of a rabid animal without a soul.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled review...mostly free of ideological giving-a-fuck.
Stalin: Breaker of Nations is a far slimmer work than The Great Terror, at once more focused and less focused. It follows Stalin's life somewhat predictably, but takes detours into the lives of other figures in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet bureaucracy afterwards. It's somewhat dense in that events are explored in detail, but somewhat cursory in that the philosophical and historical arguments those events might generate are more or less glossed over. Works like Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin take it as their raison d'etre to dig into those controversies, not so much in order to come up with definitive answers but because the debates themselves illuminate the European mind in sometimes horrifying ways. Taking such an approach in a volume like Stalin: Breaker of Nations would be length-prohibitive. Even Bloodlands covers only a very short period, starting with the Ukrainian collectivization famines and ending, basically, with the ethnic German exodus from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. To write a book about the controversies engendered in the study of Stalin would be a staggering feat, so in order to enjoy this book, one needs to put such controversies on the shelf to some degree.
The other problem with the book is that the English language reader has to be willing to put up with a great parade of Russian proper names and place names, which can get a little dense. If you can't keep "Malenkov" and "Molotov" straight, you probably won't enjoy this book much. Regardless, it's one of the most important works of scholarship on Stalin. Understanding the etiology of corruption has been a lifelong fascination with me, and understanding the Stalinist mindset is, to paraphrase Bullock's subtitle on a book about Hitler, a case study in tyranny. As such, it's highly recommended.
Troublingly, Stalin: Breaker of Nations doesn't appear to be available as an ebook. You can get it as an Audible audiobook or in paperback.
Interestingly, I've noticed a certain number of ideological complaints against Conquest, on the grounds that he's a conservative. Well, I'm not a conservative, even remotely, and all I can say is that from this volume (I have NOT read "The Great Terror"), Conquest seems to be at best middle-of-the-road. I guess from a Marxist perspective, that makes him conservative. Here in the United States, in modern parlance "conservative" means a whole different bunch of things to a whole different bunch of people. It seems to involve a lot of hating abortion and a lot of accusing Obama of being a socialist. That's not what conservative really means, and I assume that the people slinging that label at Conquest aren't accusing him of being a neocon along the lines of Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld; judging only from this book, he would be impossible to read as one of those. Conquest comes across as pretty neutral on whether Marxism is de facto a Good Thing, but I would surmise that he is, in broad terms, anti-Communist. Whoop-de-friggin'-do. To my mind, any Marxist who wants to attack Conquest on those grounds in order to rehabilitate Stalin, or to rehabilitate Stalin AT ALL, has a pretty long walk uphill...at least as far uphill as those shitbags on the right who occasionally try to say nice things about Hitler, just to "play devil's advocate." I invite those crypto-Marxist asshats to kindly fuck the fuck off. Some crimes are beyond ideology, and Stalin's history is filled with them. Any ideological lens that excuses any of Stalin's crimes is the ideological lens of a rabid animal without a soul.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled review...mostly free of ideological giving-a-fuck.
Stalin: Breaker of Nations is a far slimmer work than The Great Terror, at once more focused and less focused. It follows Stalin's life somewhat predictably, but takes detours into the lives of other figures in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet bureaucracy afterwards. It's somewhat dense in that events are explored in detail, but somewhat cursory in that the philosophical and historical arguments those events might generate are more or less glossed over. Works like Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin take it as their raison d'etre to dig into those controversies, not so much in order to come up with definitive answers but because the debates themselves illuminate the European mind in sometimes horrifying ways. Taking such an approach in a volume like Stalin: Breaker of Nations would be length-prohibitive. Even Bloodlands covers only a very short period, starting with the Ukrainian collectivization famines and ending, basically, with the ethnic German exodus from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. To write a book about the controversies engendered in the study of Stalin would be a staggering feat, so in order to enjoy this book, one needs to put such controversies on the shelf to some degree.
The other problem with the book is that the English language reader has to be willing to put up with a great parade of Russian proper names and place names, which can get a little dense. If you can't keep "Malenkov" and "Molotov" straight, you probably won't enjoy this book much. Regardless, it's one of the most important works of scholarship on Stalin. Understanding the etiology of corruption has been a lifelong fascination with me, and understanding the Stalinist mindset is, to paraphrase Bullock's subtitle on a book about Hitler, a case study in tyranny. As such, it's highly recommended.
Troublingly, Stalin: Breaker of Nations doesn't appear to be available as an ebook. You can get it as an Audible audiobook or in paperback.
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