Sarah Davies, James Harris, Stalin’s World, Dictating the Soviet Order

Abstract

Sarah Davies and James Harris have set themselves the task of trying to understand Stalin. They do this primarily through an examination of the kinds of information that Stalin had at hand, and through which he viewed the world. These two authors have spent years collectively culling and sifting through now available documents from Stalin’s personal archives—the mass of daily reports prepared for his reading, private correspondence, drafts of speeches, texts, marginal comments on texts, and e...