Reviews for The Law of Combinations Embracing Monopolies, Trusts, and Combinations of Labor and Capital

The average rating for The Law of Combinations Embracing Monopolies, Trusts, and Combinations of Labor and Capital based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-10-12 00:00:00 Martin Haverkamp What I remember very vividly from this one is that before the weird 1917 revolution the communists were like gangsters, they were on the run, they were holding up banks to finance the revolution, they were the rootingest tootingest shootingest communists in town, and young Jack Stalin was up for it, he was the Billy the Kid of the Caucasus, he was there when you needed him with his handy stick of dynamite. (I remember back in the 80s and 90s the IRA in Northern Ireland were exactly the same.) So when these bad boys stumbled into power it was perhaps not too surprising that they began to run the USSR as a series of mafia clans. They were ruthless, with their enemies and with each other. And Stalin became the Boss of Bosses, and he was the most ruthless, along with his enforcer, a glinty-eyed shimmer of implacable homicide called Beria Beria, I've just met a man called Beria And suddenly that name Will never be the same again Beria Say it loud and there's people crying Say it soft and it's almost like dying Beria I used to say it was the great tragedy of history that Stalin took control and disabled, maimed, perverted, corrupted, debased and killed the idea of communism for ever. But the guys who run capitalism are doing something broadly similar too. In the musical words of Fagin, I think we'd better think it out again.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-02-13 00:00:00 Jaycee Stichka 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.