The revolution devours its children

He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler. He had webbed toes, a grey face pitted by smallpox, a stunted arm, soft voice, yellowish eyes and an awkward rolling walk. He swore like a trooper, smoked a pipe, drank the sweet wines of his native Georgia, and was an avid reader of history, novels and Marxist-Leninist theory, marking the pages of the 20,000 books in his library with expletives scrawled with the same coloured crayons with which he signed mass death warrants and international treaties: ‘Rubbish!’, ‘Piss off!’, ‘Fool!’, ‘Scumbag!’, ‘Ha-Ha!’

The second volume of Stephen Kotkin’s wrist-breaking triple-decker biography of Joseph Stalin, (or Uncle Joe, or Koba the Dread) covers the 1930s. This was the decade when the Soviet dictator, at the height of his vast power, murdered his rivals, real and imagined; launched the great purges of his own party; decapitated the officer corps of the mighty Red Army; presided over the Holodomar — the man-made famine in which around four million Ukrainian peasants starved — and concluded a friendly treaty with Nazi Germany.

He also, as Kotkin makes clear in his balanced and level-headed narrative, drove the transformation of the USSR into an industrial and military superpower, and it is this ‘achievement’ that is advanced by his apologists — such as the late Eric Hobsbawm — as the excuse for the abominable atrocities that were the hallmark of his rule.

The problem with that claim is that Stalin’s character had been so warped by his early life as a Bolshevik terrorist, and by the revolution, civil war and struggle to succeed Lenin (chronicled in Kotkin’s first volume)that by the time he became Russia’s undisputed leader his paranoid personality led the empire close to disaster.