Showing posts with label Stephen Kotkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Kotkin. Show all posts

Saturday, February 10, 2018

Stalin’s Ghost Haunts Capitalism

A Riposte to Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941’
By Raj Sahai*.

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’.