Adam Bruno Ulam

#2

"A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world. It has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler's son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia. While still building his power base within the Bolshevik dictatorship, he embarks upon the greatest gamble of his political life and the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted: the collectivization of all agriculture and industry across one sixth of the earth. Millions will die, and many more millions will suffer, but the man will push through to the end against all resistance and doubts. Where did such power come from? In Stalin, Stephen Kotkin offers a biography that, at long last, is equal to this shrewd, sociopathic, charismatic dictator in all his dimensions. The character of Stalin emerges as both astute and blinkered, cynical and true believing, people oriented and vicious, canny enough to see through people but prone to nonsensical beliefs. We see a man inclined to despotism who could be utterly charming, a pragmatic ideologue, a leader who obsessed over slights yet was a precocious geostrategic thinker--unique among Bolsheviks--and yet who made egregious strategic blunders. Through it all, we see Stalin's unflinching persistence, his sheer force of will--perhaps the ultimate key to understanding his indelible mark on history. Stalin gives an intimate view of the Bolshevik regime's inner geography of power, bringing to the fore fresh materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police. Kotkin rejects the inherited wisdom about Stalin's psychological makeup, showing us instead how Stalin's near paranoia was fundamentally political, and closely tracks the Bolshevik revolution's structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded and penetrated by enemies. At the same time, Kotkin demonstrates the impossibility of understanding Stalin's momentous decisions outside of the context of the tragic history of imperial Russia. The product of a decade of intrepid research, Stalin is a landmark achievement, a work that recasts the way we think about the Soviet Union, revolution, dictatorship, the twentieth century, and indeed the art of history itself"--

#3

1992

The story of the rise and fall of the Communists is unparalleled in modern history. After reaching the heights of power, and, at one time, ruling over one third of mankind, Communism lies in absolute shambles, the victim of the complete bankruptcy of the theory and praxis underlying the Soviet system itself. Adam B. Ulam's extraordinary new book recounts the saga of what led to this demise, starting with the postwar period of 1948 up until 1991, when the USSR cracked asunder and came to its last gasp. The Communists is a stunning reconstruction that includes a reconsideration of Stalin's notion of Communism as an instrument of his own power. There is also a penetrating analysis--often missed by most historians--of the cult of Tito, who, as "the first heretic," played a critical role in challenging the Soviet Union and holding Stalin at bay. Even more revealing is Ulam's compelling portrayal of China in this period: its long and complex relationship with the Soviet Union; the driving force of the cold and calculating Mao, who was a central figure from the beginning of the Soviet-Chinese alliance until the "great divide"; the irreversible rift between Moscow and Beijing, which had enormous implications for international Communism. The portrait of Mao drawn here will rank as one of the most important in contemporary literature. Ulam also develops the provocative theme of how the Soviets and the Chinese secretly played off the strengths and weaknesses of each other. The Communists further elaborates on the difficulties of coexistence, Khrushchev's attempts at reforms, the stagnation under Brezhnev, the effects of the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the chronic "withering away" of the economy, the advent of Gorbachev, the failure of perestroika and glasnost to save the Soviet Union, which led to the final and total unraveling--one of the great cataclysms of the twentieth century. This major work by one of our most renowned Sovietologists is certain to be a classic that will, along with his other books, be read for decades to come.