Stalin: An Unknown Portrait - Hardcover

Kun, Miklós

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9639241199 ISBN 13: 9789639241190

Publisher: Central European University Press, 2003

Synopsis

This exceptional volume contains exciting new information about Stalin's actual and political "family", the Kremlin Mafia and the clans around him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era, including officials of the KGB and the Party, as well as people who had personal contact with the dictator as secretaries or interpreters. Kun's special expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. In addition to the interviews and hitherto unpublished correspondence between Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Zhdanov and others, the book also contains a fascinating collection of over 300 photos of Stalin, his family members, and various political actors of the period. Extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index of names add to the value of the volume.

About this title

From the Author:

At first glance, this book may seem like one of the many, but it is different--it is the first to put a number of unpublished documents from the dictator's archives into the reader's hands. I was eight years old when I read Alexei Tolstoy's Peter the First. I was enthralled. In many ways, it was this book, full of monumental battle scenes and unexpected adventures, that helped me decide to become a historian. Of course, at that point I didn't know that the "Soviet count" had brazenly lifted some of the best parts of the book from the works of the noted Russian writer, Dimitri Merezhkovsky. Nor did I know the that the descriptions of the czar had been covered with a gloss of class warfare--that this, too, had been made to fit the wishes of some Soviet party secretary. Anyone who has picked up Peter the First comes face to face with the similarities between the empire-building czar and the man who, from a pockmarked Georgian seminary student, became the Generalissimo who expanded the Soviet to the Vistula and Bug rivers. The parallels probably hit me in the little school in Orehovo-Zujevo, too, since I carefully pasted a small photograph of Joseph Stalin on the title page. In large letters I scrawled "December 21st, 1879." This was the Soviet dictator's official birthday, a day celebrated each year by millions. I am proud that, decades later, I was able to successfully piece together how Stalin and his circle changed this from the original date, December 6th, 1878.

From the Inside Flap:

This exceptional volume of oral history contains exciting new information about Stalin¡¦s actual and political "family", the political Mafia and the clans around him. The author has interviewed key politicians who survived the Stalin era, including officials of the KGB and the Komsomol, and people who had personal contact with the dictator as secretaries or interpreters. Kun's special expertise and his access to archival sources in Russia have resulted in a work revealing jealously guarded secrets. In addition to the interviews, the book also contains a fascinating selection from a private collection of photos of Stalin, his family members, and various political actors of the period. Extensive notes and 300 largely unpublished photos add to the value of the volume.

By rendering palpable the atmosphere of terror, the book sheds light on the everyday life of those closest to the dictator, who suffered because of his evil and vindictive character. Many people around Stalin were members of the two families into which he married. He hated the Alliluyeva family because his second wife, Nadezhda, had humiliated him by committing suicide. His hatred drove him to order the death of most of the family, while driving others to suicide or sentencing them to the Gulag.

About this edition

• Publisher: Central European University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 9639241199
• ISBN 13: 9789639241190
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 396