Mihir Yedur’s Reviews > Stalin: A Political Biography > Status Update

Excellent. In the annals of revolutionary despotism, Stalin is placed alongside the Robespierres and Napoleons of history. Deutscher makes no bones about Stalin: that brutish, vindictive thug who saw himself fighting the barbarism of the old, with the barbarism of the new. In a perverse way, a wholesale indictment of Stalinism seems to foreclose Berman’s Faustian bargain of modernity, and modernisation.