A
Riposte to Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Stalin: Waiting for Hitler,
1929-1941’
By
Raj Sahai*.
Source: Marxism-Leninism today.
Princeton
University historian Stephen Kotkin is writing a monumental
three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin. Kotkin’s is the latest in
a large number of books on Stalin, starting with Isaac Deutscher in
1949. So, why yet another book on Stalin?
Kotkin
says Stalin represents a “gold standard” in “personal
dictatorship”, and more archival documents are now accessible, so
now a definitive biography of Stalin can finally be written. He takes
Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky as a model for
his own work. Published in 2015, Kotkin’s first volume was titled
‘Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878 - 1928’. Volume 2, published in
November 2017, is titled ‘Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929 –
1941’.