The loving father: Stalin with Svetlana, 1933.
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
A visit in the south, 1933. Left to right: chief of the Red Army General Staff Aleksandr Yegorov; Defense Commissar Kliment Voroshilov; Stalin; Soviet military leader Mikhail Tukhachevsky; Abkhaz leader Nestor Lakoba. Lakoba died in 1936 under mysterious circumstances and was soon proclaimed an “enemy of the people.” Tukhachevsky was shot in 1937 and Yegorov in 1938. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
The near dacha, where Stalin lived (starting after his wife’s suicide) and died.
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History
A rare family gathering in the mid-1930s. Left to right: Stalin’s son Vasily, Leningrad party boss Andrei Zhdanov, daughter Svetlana, Stalin, and Stalin’s son (by his first wife) Yakov, who was killed in a Nazi POW camp. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
Stalin inspects new military hardware at the Kremlin, September 1943. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
The Allies: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Crimea, February 1945.
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
Generalissimo Stalin immediately after the war.
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
Stalin and his comrades at a celebration in January 1947. Left to right: Beria, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Molotov, Kuznetsov, Stalin, Kosygin, Voznesensky, Voroshilov, and Shkiriatov. Two years later Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were arrested and shot. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
Stalin at a party congress in 1952, four months before his death.
Unflattering photographs like this one were not published. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
Millions of copies of Stalin’s works were published in all languages. After his death they provided tons of recycled paper pulp. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.
NOTES
Preface
1. Adam. B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York, 1973); Robert C. Tucker: Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973), and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990).
2. Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (London, 2004); Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin: Profiles in Power (New York, 2005); Sarah Davies and James Harris, eds., Stalin: A New History (New York, 2005); Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait (Budapest and New York, 2003); Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin and the Russian Revolutionary Movement: From Koba to Commissar (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). Concerning Stalin the dictator and his relations with the rest of the Soviet leadership, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (New Haven and London, 2008), and Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (New York, 2004). Some works have attempted to peer into Stalin’s inner world: A. J. Rieber, “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,” American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (2001): 1651–1691; Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London and New York, 2002); B. S. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’ Stalina (Moscow, 2002); Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York, 2005). Many works on the Terror and the Gulag have added to our understanding of Stalin’s personal role in organizing mass repression: Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York, 2003); V. N. Khaustov and L. Samuel’son, Stalin, NKVD i repressii. 1936–1938 (Moscow, 2009); Jörg Baberowski, Verbrannte Erde: Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt (Munich, 2012). Despite copious literature on World War II, Stalin’s role as supreme commander in chief has yet to be adequately investigated. An analogous lacuna exists in regard to the Cold War and Stalin’s handling of foreign policy.
3. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York, 1991); Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives (New York, 1997); Simon Sebag Montefiore: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London, 2003), and Young Stalin (London, 2007).
4. Collections of letters have been published as part of the Annals of Communism Series: Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg Khlevniuk, eds., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936 (New Haven, 1995), and R. W. Davies et al., eds., The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936 (New Haven and London, 2003).
5. A. A. Chernobaev, ed., Na prieme u Stalina. Tetradi (zhurnaly) zapisei lits, priniatykh I. V. Stalinym (1924–1953 gg.) (Moscow, 2008).
6. S. V. Deviatov et al., Moskovskii Kreml’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (Moscow, 2010), pp. 113–114.
7. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1–11. (An opis’ [op.] is the equivalent of a drawer in a filing cabinet.) Opis’ 11 comprises Stalin’s personal archive, brought to RGASPI from the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation (the former Politburo Archive).
8. “Thematic” folders (tematicheskie papki) are subject-specific folders of documents that were submitted to the Politburo and Stalin; they comprise the main historical component of the Presidential Archive.
9. Sergei Khrushchev, ed.: Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 1: Commissar (University Park, PA, 2004); Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2: Reformer (University Park, PA, 2006); and Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3: Statesman (University Park, PA, 2007); A. I. Mikoian, Tak bylo. Razmyshleniia o minuvshem (Moscow, 1999); Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, The Memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan (Madison, CT, 1988).
10. In a splendid review published soon after Mikoyan’s memoirs came out in Russian, Michael Ellman convincingly argued that Mikoyan’s text had been altered (Michael Ellman, “The Road from Il’ich to Il’ich,” Slavic Review 60, no. 1 [2001]: 141). In a response, Mikoyan’s son Sergo categorically stated, “I did not ‘correct’ my father’s stories” (Slavic Review, 60, no. 4 [2001]: 917). This vague formulation came with an important subtext. Sergo Mikoyan was not saying that he did not alter the dictated manuscript, leaving open the possibility that he did supplement the initial transcript of his father’s dictation with subsequent accounts by the elder Mikoyan that were not “correct.” Clearly, any such additions should have been made explicit or, better yet, placed in a footnote.