Stalin in October: The Man Who Missed the Revolution

Originally published in 1987. In March 1917 young Joseph Stalin, already a high-ranking Bolshevik, returned from Siberian exile in search of greatness and power. But his activities during the months leading up to the October Revolution were full of blunders and misjudgments—failures that in later years Stalin obliterated from the historical record. Stalin in October reassembles the history of 1917 and explains why, on the eve of the revolutionaries' seizure of power, Stalin seemingly dropped out of the picture. "He would always be dogged," Slusser writes, "by a nagging sense of having somehow missed the revolution." The lingering shame was crucial to Stalin's development into a Soviet dictator.

Robert M. Slusser was a professor of Russian and Soviet history at Michigan State University. He also taught at Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. He wrote a number of books on Russian history, including The Berlin Crisis of 1961: Soviet-American Relations and the Struggle for Power in the Kremlin, June-November 1961.