Stalin: A Political Biography

by Isaac Deutscher

Exhaustive analysis of the life and career of the Soviet Union's most brutal dictator

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Russia, Soviet Union, Russian History

704 pages, Paperback

Published December 31, 1967

About the author

Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky, in particular, was highly influential among the British New Left.

Reviews

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exhaustive look into the political biography of Stalin. Obviously pre-1956, so the true horror is lacking. Still pretty good, and many other works on Stalin have used it as a source.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

UPDATE: finished:
Stalin's career, and this biography, cover an intense perid of Russian history from the last decades of the Tsars through revolution, civil war, World War, to the first decades of the nuclear age. It's an epic, brutal, at times heroic, and almost always tragic tale. Stalin seems to have moved across -and shaped - this vast world-historical stage driven more by calculations of immediate political expediency and the whisperings of his inner demons than by any grand design. There is a lot to reflect on in such a story, and one strength of this biography is that it leaves room for those reflections, without beating the reader over the head with an ideological (or psychological) agenda.

UPDATE halfway:
Stalin's political behaviour makes sense when viewed in the context of his life. An intelligent child born to an abusive drunkard Father, his earliest life lessons must have been not to trust anyone, to keep his true thoughts hidden, to observe other people keenly, to bide his time and always protect himself against danger. His experiences in the Seminary and as a revolutionary can only have reinforced and rewarded those survival instincts and skills. His early life reads like a recipe for creating a Cunning Murderous Pyschopath.

The danger, from the perspective of political history, is that we tend to write-off his career with those last three words, as if they prove there is nothing more to be learned from his story. In death, as in life, Stalin continues to be underestimated as a politician.

Aside from the story of the man himself, of course, his biography is also a story of the rise and development of Bolshevism, the Russian revolution, and the Soviet State.

A key lesson (informed by Joanthon Schell) I'm drawing from that second story is that while at certain times non-violent revolution (regime overthrow) is easy, social change following a revolution is nearly always hard, and is very often bloody.

Most of the time, then, activists might more usefully focus their energy on the slow work of social change than on hopeless charges at the overt ramparts of regime power.

EARLY THOUHGTS:
It's fascinating to read (from the perspective of Stalin's involvement) about the Bolshevik revolution and realise just how contingent it was, how easily history could have been very different.

[William West]

The author, Isaac Deutscher, was a devout Trotskyist, which makes the objectivity with which he approaches this most difficult of subjects all the more remarkable. The Stalin he paints is a frightened, self-loathing, miserable man- possessing incomprehensible capacties for ruthlessness, but also remarkable energy and an ability to devote himself entiely to the problem at hand. (He never would have gotten far without that ability to focus on immediate problems, Deutscher suggests, because he consistantly displayed a short-sightedness that created unnecessary crises.)

Unlike the standard, western "he was SO evil!" acounts, Deutshcer allows that Stalin was an indespensable leader in the struggle against Hitler, and the spread of Soviet influence into easter Europe is presented by Deutscher not as the result of thirst for empire but a desperate need to buffet Russia against a West (either in the form of the Axis or the "Allies") that terrified it.

None of this should obscure the fact that the chapters on the purges read like a horror novel, the realization that a seemingly humble, ideologically devoted man was in fact meglamaniacally waiting for the moment when he could deface an entire generation, an entire episode of history, with His Face.

The days immediately following Stalin's death sound like they call out to be dramatized by Beckett, or filmed by Bela Tarr.

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded down from 4.5. I'll need to do a proper review once I've finished making notes, but suffice to say for the moment that Deutscher's biog of Stalin really is a classic and a must-read for the student of Soviet history. Tons of formulations that I consider to be totally wrong, and Deutscher makes little effort to hide his basic eurocentric bias (and in so doing brings to light one of most important dynamics of 20th century politics: the eastward shift of Marxism and the complex reaction to that process in the West). Nonetheless the author brings the history to life with his detailed knowledge and insight.

[Derek Bridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sub-title makes it clear that this book is not about Stalin, the man. This makes it quite dry. And its vintage (the bulk of it written in 1948) means that there is much that has come to light subsequently of which it is unaware. On the other hand, Deutscher has an almost journalistic familiarity with the events that younger historians cannot tap into. I found it hard-going but worth reading.

[RYD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Isaac Deutscher is one of my favorite historians, and his trilogy on the life of Trotsky is an incredible set of books. This biography of Stalin did less for me, though it is still insightful.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly readable, rich and thorough overview of Stalin's political life. Some conclusions may be outdated now but otherwise a very good read.

[Gage Hoefer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve decided to leave my old, somewhat juvenile review up in conjunction with my current thoughts. I’m not a Trotskyist, but I’m also not much of a Stalinist; I think I was unfair all those years ago, and too quick to disregard Deutscher’s analysis (which I find eminently readable) as surface level Trotskyist pablum. On second read, I have a much more favorable opinion of this. The subscript is “a political biography”, and that’s exactly what Deutscher delivers. Thankfully we are spared any sort of psycho-moral babble about supposed evil in Stalin’s heart (as most anti-communists would have you believe), or other standard fare from a biography of an important historical figure. Deutscher is not overly apologetic, to be sure- you can’t cover the 1930’s without talking about the purges, after all. The impression I get this time is that Stalin was a brutal man in a brutal position. How much the position influenced the man or vice versa is less clear- but for all his faults, I think when we look at what the USSR accomplished at that time, and what they tried to achieve in later years, it is astounding. The lives of those pre-1917, and post, are so fundamentally different it boggles my mind. It’s also something we can learn from, and use moving forward into the future. I’d certainly rather live in a world that had the Soviet Union, even with Stalin, than one without.


******************************************************

Fairly even handed for a Trotskyist, though Deutscher sometimes embarrassingly shows his hand when describing Trotsky and his writings during the '30's. I also think he tends to read too much of the life of Bonaparte and Robespierre into the life and choices of Stalin. Overall, pretty good book

[Ajax Minor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm on a mini roll, so as long as i've been discussing Isaac Deutscher's trilogy on Trotsky, i might as well wade in on Stalin.
i read it in college, in a course about political trials, and was hooked on everything Soviet and Russian. next up was War and Peace and i never looked back.
the Russian Revolution is detailed as brilliantly in this history as in any other. Stalin's life and career truly validate the phrase, 'you can't make this stuff up'. i won't repeat what other reviewers have said, but simply remark: READ IT.
one question that haunted me after i finished the book was, 'what would had happened had 1) Lenin lived a great deal longer and 2) what if Trotsky had read Lenin's will at the Party Congress and denounced (and bounced) Joe? would he have matched Stalin's achievement in WWII, holding Hitler at bay, given his brilliant execution for the Reds during the Civil War?

[John Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

At university I studied Quantum Chemistry but was friends with a lot of people studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and often was mistaken for being either someone studying PPE or Theology LOL
This book was part of my wider reading on history and politics that I did when I was an undergraduate and it earned me the nickname of "Stalin" amongst a few of the people in the year below me - I think it was because I read it in the Junior Common Room and in the bar at college - it was for one term the "book in my bag".
Deutscher possibly because he didn't like Stalin does a good deal of research on him and the early Soviet Union. It is not a hatchet-job in the way it could have been but it was not a hagiography. It is how I like my political biographies.

[Kosta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for a history of the era. Deutscher goes beyond the standard, lazy, cold-war tropes that explain all the events in the USSR in this era by way of Stalin's personal megalomania and evil and looks at the material conditions underpinning every development.
Outside of maybe a couple of lapses (impressively few given its 650 page length), Deutscher has given us a principled analysis that gives credit where credit's due while not sparing anyone, Stalin, Trotsky, or anybody else, from rightful criticism.
This lack of bias is especially impressive given that Deutscher was a Trotskyist who wrote a three-part biography of Trotsky.
A profoundly well-researched work, I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a principled materialist history and critique of the USSR under Stalin.

[Bazookayaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best Stalin biography. It's a wonderful assessment as the author is a Marxist looking at the protagonist through a neutral lens from the Left. While Isaac Deutscher is known to have written the famous Prophet trilogy on Trotsky, make no mistake : the latter is criticized here for his idealist tendencies, bias in his views of Stalin as well as tendency not to anticipate Koba's next moves and potential. The work is utterly addictive and just as well written as The Prophet. One can get a clear understanding of Joseph Djugashvili's character against the backdrop of unique historical events and their material basis. Utterly thorough, great Marxist work from one of the best political writers ever.

[Scot McAtee · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the advice of a good friend, I picked this book up whilst living in Inchon, Korea in 1996. I wasn't really sure it would be worth the read, but what I really wanted to know was how the man got to be so powerful. It was a good read, and fifteen years later, I still recall passages from this book. I wouldn't say that it's a thrilling read, but anyone interested in Twentieth Century history will enjoy it.

I wish that American high schools did a better job covering the 20th century but since we hit WW2 and then cherry pick everything since, books like this have helped me to fill in the holes of why things today are the way they are.

[Katie Brennan · Rating 3 out of 5]

amazingly clear-sighted despite being written in '49. kept thinking about how hard it would be to write a biography of a man who had so much influence and impact yet didn't seem to tell a soul what he was really thinking -- so here you get his maneuverings in detail, but also a sense that he's not there at all. i won't blame deutscher for this though. SO MUCH INTRIGUE, so many tears.

[Brendan James · Rating 5 out of 5]

From a biographer widely-known as an admirer of Trotsky, a bio of Stalin that's at times downright flattering. Final chapter -- added after Stalin's death -- is much more critical. Excellent detail on the political twists and turns not only of Stalin but of the Bolsheviks in general. Surprisingly breezy read.

[Varun Sadasivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As this is a propaganda biography and not an independent work , everything must be taken with a bucketful of salt and pepper. This book is a great insight into how the soviet government wanted to project Stalin as a leader , while reading the book I get a feel that the way it has been written it is intended towards people outside the USSR.

[Steph Kenific · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me more like 5 years to finish this book. I’m so glad I started it, and I’m so glad I finished it! I would love to see it condensed and made more palatable for today’s readers, but I’m better for having read it. It’s necessary for all leftists to understand the complexities of Stalin and Stalinist Russia, and Deutscher’s book is an important text for such learning.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could have been a turgid mess, but Deutscher keeps it interesting and relevant. A good book for anyone interested in Russian history.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit dry in parts, but very detailed and informative.

[William Sariego · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic, and still one of the better biographies available, despite its age.

[Varði · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent biography of Stalin, highly recommend.

[Kasandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good - one of the two books I used for my Russian history coursework that focused on Stalin's industrialisation efforts.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think his treatment of Trotsky is superior but this is a wonderful biography of stalin without discernable slant for or against.

[Mike Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Monster devouring its own children: political biographies are inevitably biased by the author’s own beliefs - an unavoidable truism, but Isaac Deutscher was at least fairly self-aware and had the benefit of living through the era. This is an infuriating book but equally unputdownable not because one needs to know how it ends but because of the cult surrounding Jughashvili. Written by a lifelong communist - albeit a Trotskyite rather than a Stalinist - it can claim some objectivity and is probably the best we are going to get given the divisive subject matter.

Stalin was the least of the triumvirate that drove the Russian revolution: a poor Georgian peasant who was intelligent but uneducated, he lacked Lenin’s strategic mind and Trotsky’s intellect which left him with an entire potato harvest on his shoulder and a huge amount of “unscrupulous rancour and spite” demonstrated again and again through the purges, murder of opponents abroad (not an original idea of Putin’s, then), his treatment of Poland in the war or even the eruption of queeny fits against his rivals - Trotsky, “a poseur...with fake muscles.”

Deutscher’s balanced view is that Stalin‘s remarkable will drove him to feats way beyond the capacity of most people of his intellectual abilities - when he met Russia she was turning the fields with a wooden plough; when he left her she was dipping uranium rods into cooling ponds is how he sums up the remarkable transformation in 30 years. An agrarian, illiterate and unmechanised society had become industrial, technological, educated. For a poor boy from the mountains, resentfully educated at a third rate seminary it was a remarkable transformation to lead, yet there was “a baffling disproportion between the magnitude of the second revolution and its maker.” Much as this sounds like the bitter defeat of an opponent, Deutscher nevertheless makes the case that Stalin was a lesser man than Lenin, who had created and led the revolution, or Trotsky who saw the danger from Hitler whilst Stalin enabled him.

More than that, it was the terrible cost of everything he did, the thousands of opponents who died in the Gulags or by firing squad, the millions who starved in the botched bureaucracy of collectivisation, the sclerotic nightmare of a country where every thought, word and deed had to be approved by the Leader. His judgement was also far from the wise, all-seeing father of the nation despite the cult of Stalin’s projection of this as his character; see for instance the tale of the Polish American Catholic priest called Orlemanski from Springfield, Massachusetts, who tried to engage Stalin in commune with the Holy Father (as is the way of these things, the dictator went off the idea pretty quickly and the Pope defrocked the unfortunate priest). The echoes here of Rasputin make one think that poor Russia has gone from autocracy to oligarchy to kleptocracy with barely a break.

The first edition was written during Stalin’s lifetime - this later version contains an additional chapter which would have brought it up to date in the early 60s when Bay of Pigs paranoia was at its height. Its age means there is the stylistic datedness (he is fond of short tabloidesque sentences à la Alan Taylor which actually slow the pace, as well as an over-burdening use of statistics) and Deutscher’s of-its-time unwillingness to consider the personal as political was very much the then academic vogue. He talks of the Stalianist era as a monster devouring its own children which is an interesting turn of phrase considering Stalin drove his second wife to suicide and his children became alcoholics or defectors, and this deserves its own treatise. Even with these considerations of hindsight, which do make it a challenge, it’s a thorough, compelling and probably as comprehensive biography as we are likely to get. The battered Pelican I have fell into my bag (oops) just as I was leaving Chatham House school in 1985. I feel as though now I’ve repaid my debt.

[Matthew Mercer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent political biography of Stalin, which is partially limited by the theoretical outlook of its author.

From the point of view of being a biography of a single man’s political career, the book is quite impressive. Particularly interesting is when Deutscher delves into the (semi-speculative) territory of how Stalin may have subjectively viewed his own project. (To summarise Deutscher’s position briefly: the project of ‘socialism in one country’ permitted the subordination of all theoretical socialist principles to the practical expediency of advancing the interests of a single, legitimately ‘socialist’ state. Therefore, obvious betrayals of Marxism and a real desire to build (a distorted version of) ‘socialism’ could both exist, subjectively, in Stalin’s head - one of Deutscher’s favoured ‘dialectical contradictions’ of Stalin.)

This book is really a page-turner, Issac Deutscher was an excellent writer. He was also an orthodox Trotskyist, which shines through in both the insights and oversights of his book. Deutscher has no reservations about the political bankruptcy of Stalinism, detailing again and again how Stalin departed from Marxist orthodoxy generally, from the political traditions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks specifically, and from his own revolutionary past.

At the same time, Deutscher has to reconcile his criticisms with his orthodox Trotskyist framework, which sees Stalin’s U.S.S.R. as continuing and deepening the social gains of 1917 - primarily in the growth of the planned economy - in spite of the bureaucratic, totalitarian, anti-Marxist political growth at the top of society. The sad irony of this contradiction is that Deutscher (as well as other contemporary Trotskyist critics of Stalinism) wind up accepting much of the premise of Stalinist ‘socialism’.

For Deutscher and co., Stalin wasn’t an outright counter-revolutionary, or the lead representative of a new bureaucratic ruling class. As he succinctly puts it, Stalin was “both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory, but creative revolution.” Historical analogies abound; Stalin was the Russian Robespierre, whose reign of terror lasted decades instead of months only because the Russian Jacobins - the Bolsheviks - were unable to be ousted by force; Stalin was the Russian Napoleon, who spread a new economic and social system by conquest when international revolution failed to materialise; Stalin was the Russian Bismark, an enlightened despot directing the development of a new, progressive mode of production from above, et cetera.

So while Deutscher is always cutting and useful when it comes to Stalin’s betrayals, crimes and distortions of Marxism, he still holds to the idea that the society Stalin created and spread was somehow socialist, flawed though it may have been. Because he thinks he sees a contradictory, dialectical advancement of the international socialist revolution (at Russian gun-point), no matter how many of the obvious signifiers or accoutrements of a new ruling class he is able to identify, he is politically unable to identify the existence of the new ruling class itself.

As Deutscher himself ends it:

“Posterity, haunted by Stalin, perplexed by the legacy of his rule yet still unable to master and transcend it, for the time being sought merely to cast him out of its memory.”

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I detailed career biography of Stalin from underground international communist revolutionary to calculating, megalomaniacal, cruel head of national communism. post-Cold War is really a postscript here. The Cold War details show evidence of empire building and a view of Russian people that I feel Putin may share:

Russia is taught to distrust and despise the world outside, to glory in nothing but her own genius, to care for nothing but her own self-centered greatness, to rely on nothing but her own selfishness, and to look forward to nothing but the triumphs of her own power. Stalinism tries to annex to Great Russia all the feats that the genius of other nations has had to its credit. It declares it to be a crime for the Russian to entertain any thought about the greatness, past or present, of any other nation-to 'kow-tow to western civilization' and a crime for the Ukrainian, the Georgian, and the Uzbek not to kow-tow to Great Russia.

Megalomania and xenophobia were to cure the people of their sense of inferiority, render them immune to those attractions of the western culture by which generations of the intelligentsia had been spellbound, protect them against the demoralizing impact of American wealth, and harden them for the trials of the Cold War and, if need be, for armed conflict. The heat of the chauvinistic agitation was a measure of the war fever in which the country lived.

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

does as it says: emphasis on factional Politburo struggles, his personal life only comes into it at the start when he was first becoming interested in politics.

Deutscher is of course a sympathiser with the revolution so there's no anti-communist proselytising or moralising about the excess death (understatesment). There's also a lot less data than I might have liked.

Deutscher's a great writer but his bouts of analysis are more flights of style re-hashing Trotsky's positions; Stalin being a theoretical dunce, socialism in one country being nationalistic, which is not to say that they're incorrect positions wrong but perhaps just reproduced in an unexamined way given their source. Kotkin better on balance, but this is definitely worth reading alongside his Prophet trilogy. Still have absolutely no idea why he murdered all his friends.

[David Hayter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arguably still the most important volume on Stalin available. This also provides an excellent overview of the Russian revolutionary tradition and the events surrounding the Bolshevik victory in October 1917. Its coverage of WW2 is a little lacking with more oblique references to major events like Stalingrad and Kursk. For those of course one need look no farther than Glanz & House "When Titans Clashed." But overall if you want a primer on Russian & Soviet history from the late 19th c up to 1953, this is it. Tucker's 2 volumes on Stalin, plus Volkogonov's and Suny's would be good further reading on the person himself. Avoid Kotkin and most others at all costs.

[Chris Schaffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would’ve liked more on the Show Trials.

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant biography, principally marred by a habit of presenting racial typology (eg, of Stalin as Oriental despot) as materialist analysis.