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Stalin and His Hangmen
Highlights:
Stalin, like Hitler and other tyrants, won and held power because he had collaborators – hangmen. Drawing on newly released archival material, Donald Rayfield gives us a fuller and more colourful picture of Stalin’s inner circle than ever before. Stalin was not the sole author of Stalinism. What motivated his chiefs of police, Feliks Dzierzynski, Viacheslav Manzhinsky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrenti Beria? What did they want? What were their relations with the regime and its ruler? How did their upbringing and experience mould them? And how does the terror they create connect with the terror they felt? Stalin and His Hangmen reconstructs the psychological mechanism of a whole regime and what it held together. The extent of the misery caused by Stalin and his Hangmen can be compared in Europe only to that brought about by Hitler and his henchmen. But Stalin’s heritage is, if possible, even worse than Hitler’s. His rule enslaved three generations, not one, the horror of what he did has not yet been fully understood and his countrymen have not yet found the strenth to disavow him. All the more important, then, that this diabolical tale should be told.
Stalin: A Biography
Highlights:
In this acclaimed biography, Robert Service brings us closer than ever to an understanding of one of the most notorious figures in world history. Drawing on unpublished material from the Moscow archives, personal testimonies and private papers, this book illuminates the man as well as the dictator, placing him truly in the frame of his politics, party and revolution.
With unprecedented detail, Service describes Stalin’s formative influences – his alcoholic father and devout mother, his Georgian origins, his religious training and his embrace of revolutionary Marxism – and shows how they shaped his later life as a Bolshevik militant, rising party chief and ruthless despot.
More importantly, Service ties together Stalin’s political intellect, his voracious reading and surprising fondness for composing poetry with his penchant for glory, revenge and mass murder. Accounts of Stalin have been mythologized and distorted, but Robert Service’s painstaking research and thirty-year engagement with his subject has allowed him to write a magisterial, shocking and utterly compelling biography of this most extraordinary figure.
“Outstanding…will be read for decades.” –London Sunday Times
“Service has written a masterly book…No one has shown in more convincing detail Stalin’s evolution to the absolute power that corrupts absolutely.” –Spectator
Stalingrad
Highlights:
In October 1942, a panzer officer wrote ‘Stalingrad is no longer a town…Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure’. The battle for Stalingrad became the focus of Hitler and Stalin’s determination to win the gruesome, vicious war on the eastern front. The citizens of Stalingrad endured unimaginable hardship; the battle, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting in each room of each building, was brutally destructive to both armies. But the eventual victory of the Red Army, and the failure of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, was the first defeat of Hitler’s territorial ambitions in Europe, and the start of his decline. An extraordinary story of tactical genius, civilian bravery, obsession, carnage and the nature of war itself, Stalingrad will act as a testament to the vital role of the soviet war effort.