Founding Father Book

I read this book in a span of about three or four weeks and could not put it down. It read like a novel and was very engrossing. It details every aspect of Stalin's life, first as the child Soso, then as the revolutionary Koba, and finally as the iron-willed dictator Stalin. The Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 is covered and then it details Stalin's rise in the Party. In 1922 he became General Secretary and two years later Lenin died setting in motion the power struggle that took place over the next five years between Stalin his rivals in the party, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin. Stalin emerged the victor in 1929 and consolidated his control over the Party and the entire country. He set in motion the five-year plans that made the Soviet Union an industrial nation overnight although at the cost of millions of lives. He next sought to eliminate his rivals, he had already done so before politically, now they were to be exterminated.

Using the murder of his rival Kirov in 1934 as an excuse to start a purge of the Party, the "Great Terror" as it was known lasted for more than four years and saw countless show trials, arrests, deportations to the Gulag, torture, and executions. This is definately the highlight of the book as the author details the cruelty and the methods with which the NKVD liquidated "enemies of the people." In 1937 the purge that began in the party soon spread to every part of Soviet society as people were encourged to turn their neighbors in. It finally ended toward the end of 1938 with the entire Party and country being obedient to only him.

This book also has some new revelations that are definately to be taken with a grain of salt. The biggest of these is that his planned purge of Jews toward the end of his reign was being done to provoke a Third World War with the West. I thought his overall evidence was a little weak but it was still interesting nonetheless. Also there are a few inaccuracies in this book as well that prevent it from getting five stars. One is the statement that Stalin was the first to have the hydrogen bomb in 1953 when in fact the U.S. had exploded one in 1952. But overall this was a very good read and is recommended to anyone interested in this time period of history.