![]() Stalin proclaimed that collectivization, the end of market relations and the descent into despotism were in fact the building of socialism - and the author of this volume agrees - but to Stalin’s critics on the left (Trotskyists, Social Democrats and independent Marxist intellectuals) they were the “revolution betrayed,” a sanguinary counterrevolution. ![]() In one year, 1937-1938, between 700,000 and 800,000 Soviet citizens and unfortunate foreigners in the country were executed. The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party. ![]() The 1930s was the decade of the “revolution from above” that dispossessed peasants and converted them into agricultural suppliers to the state, the city and the army it was the time when the state unleashed mass terror against elites and ordinary people that decimated the Soviet Communist Party decapitated the Red Army disciplined the intelligentsia into straitjacketed conformity and drove millions of people into exile, prison camps and emigration, if they managed to survive. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 19291941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa. In “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” a mammoth volume of more than 1,100 pages, Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin presents in vivid, irresistible and unrelenting detail that part of Stalin’s life - and Soviet history - that has, more than any other, fascinated scholars and general readers about the Soviet experience. Author Stephen Kotkin (Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941) continues his multi-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, with a focus on Stalins leadership. ![]()
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