Stalin: The Man and His Era (Beacon Paperback)

Josef Stalin, writes historian Adam B. Ulam in his now-classic biography, was the consummate outsider, a man who spoke Russian with a Georgian accent all his life yet still proclaimed himself to be the supreme father of the Russian people. Often pictured as a semiliterate boor, Stalin was in fact an intellectual, and he destroyed the intellectual class to which he belonged "as thoroughly as any class in history had ever been destroyed." Ulam's account of the 20th century's Genghis Khan is an absorbing study of power won and terrifyingly applied.

Josef Stalin, writes historian Adam B. Ulam in his now-classic biography, was the consummate outsider, a man who spoke Russian with a Georgian accent all his life yet still proclaimed himself to be the supreme father of the Russian people. Often pictured as a semiliterate boor, Stalin was in fact an intellectual, and he destroyed the intellectual class to which he belonged "as thoroughly as any class in history had ever been destroyed." Ulam's account of the 20th century's Genghis Khan is an absorbing study of power won and terrifyingly applied.