Stalin: A Biography

By Robert Service

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, History

In Stalin: A Biography (2004), Oxford historian Robert Service draws on Soviet archives opened after 1991 to follow Joseph Stalin from Georgian seminarian and revolutionary to master of the Soviet Union. Service portrays Stalin as both a ruthless dictator and a committed Marxist with real intellectual interests, and examines his upbringing, private life and methods of rule alongside the terror, collectivisation and war that defined his years in power.

Recommended by 1 person

• Ben Shapiro: “Similarly amazing Robert Services's biography of Stalin.”