Inside Stalin's head: a biography offers fresh insights on one of history's bloodiest dictators.

• Author: Naimark, Norman M.
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Stalin, vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power - Book review

Stalin: Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin, Penguin Press, 912 pages, $99.99

We all think we know Stalin. He was the brutal and vengeful dictator of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until 1953, when, mercifully, he died before he could do any more damage. He was the instigator of forced industrialization and collectivization, taking his country down a dead-end path to modernity from which its heirs are still trying to recover. As the valued ally of Great Britain and the United States during World War II, he was responsible for his country's great victory over Nazism, which cost, sometimes senselessly, the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens. He was the primary author of the Cold War, instigating such crises as the Berlin Blockade and the Korean conflict. Stalin killed millions of people--party rivals, army officers, "kulaks" (supposedly rich peasants), ex-tsarist bureaucrats and nobles, nationalities, "asocials" (alleged prostitutes, petty thieves, gamblers, the chronically homeless and unemployed, etc.), and innumerable "counterrevolutionaries." He used the famine of the early 1930s to commit genocide against the Ukrainians. He deported and murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet Poles, Germans, Koreans, Chechens-Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks--the list goes on and on.

Yet given Stalin's enormous importance to the history of the 20th century, it is remarkable how little we understand about his personality and motives. He left no memoirs and kept no diaries. His letters to his comrades, such as the telegraphic communications he sent to Moscow from his summer headquarters in Sochi, rarely have the color or tone of intimate notes. Those around him maintained no records of his conversations or ruminations. Memoirs of close comrades and acolytes, such as Viacheslav Molotov or Anastas Mikoyan, were not published until long after Stalin's death. The same goes for the scattered reminiscences of a variety of family members, chauffeurs, cooks, and security guards.

He was an inveterate editor, so we do have his frequent markings on political articles and essays and notations on manuscripts and books. We hear him "speak" in lengthy and detailed official protocols of the Central Committee or Politburo meetings that were made available to researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union. But these reveal more about his signature political repartee--hard hitting, to the point, caustic, self-deprecating--than about his inner world. Historians also face the same problem that his contemporaries did in trying to understand him: Stalin was a consummate dissembler. He frequently assumed poses, played roles, and concealed his real thoughts. He plotted and schemed and had a supremely tactical mind.

In Paradoxes of Power, the first installment of a projected three-volume biography of Stalin, the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin has done a superb job of getting us up close to the dictator. This book traces Stalin's story from birth to 1928, when he inflicted the momentous First Five Year Plan and forced collectivization on the Soviet Union. Kotkin has mastered the vast historical...