This biography examines the life of Joseph Stalin using easy-to-read, compelling text. Through striking historical and contemporary images and photographs and informative sidebars, readers will learn about Stalin's family background, childhood, education, and his time as dictator of the Soviet Union. Informative sidebars enhance and support the text. Features include a table of contents, timeline, facts page, glossary, bibliography, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

This book describes the life of Joseph Stalin, who was the dictator of the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953.

The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

'Stalin and Stalinism' examines Stalin's ambiguous personal and political legacy, his achievements and his crimes - all the subject of major reappraisal both in the West and in the former Soviet Union.

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject History of Europe - Ages of World Wars, grade: 92.0, Westminster College, language: English, abstract: It is proposed that Joseph Stalin, the man as well as the symbol, be analyzed in order to reveal the man behind the icon. This research will include details of Stalin's everyday life and his vacations on the Black Sea, the “Great Terror,” World War II, and the terrifying decades of his supreme power. It will also go into detail about the suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadya, and how it affected him for the rest of his life, what kind of man he was as a father, as well as the lives of the members of his inner circle and their fall from grace. From a historical context Joseph Stalin comes off as being psychotic, merciless, killer, and a brutal dictator. This research will attempt to reveal that this dictator of a nuclear capable world super-power, merges as being, although a bit paranoid, surprisingly normal and quite human.

An engrossing biography of the notorious Russian dictator by an author whose knowledge of Soviet-era archives far surpasses all others. Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953. During that quarter-century, by Oleg Khlevniuk’s estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin’s policies. What drove him toward such ruthlessness? This essential biography offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator’s life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history. In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin’s favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes: Stalin’s childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World War II, and the postwar period. At the book’s conclusion, the author presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era. “This brilliant, authoritative, opinionated biography ranks as the best on Stalin in any language.”—Martin McCauley East-West Review “A historiographical and literary masterpiece.”—Mark Edele, Australian Book Review “A very digestible biography, yet one packed with revelations.”—Paul E. Richardson, Russian Life Magazine

Perestroika and glasnost have unleashed unprecedented criticism of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, and the terrible legacy of his regime has been acknowledged by Mikhail Gorbachev.