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This book forms the second volume of Tucker's biography of Stalin, the first volume of which, as Revolutionary, was recently reissued by Norton in the United Kingdom. Robert Tucker shows that Stalin was a Bolshevik of the radical right whose cast the country deep into its imperial, autocratic past. In 1929 Stalin plunged Soviet Russia into a coercive revolution from above, a decade long effort to amass military-industrial power for a new war. He forced 25 million peasant families into state-run collectives and transformed the Communist Party into a servile instrument. In 1939, he concluded the pact with Hitler that enabled him to grasp at Eastern Europe while Hitler made war in the West. Tucker brings a fresh and authoritative analysis to these events and to the Terror of the 1930s, revealing the motives and methods of what he calls the greatest murder mystery of this century.
Campbell et al. (Tue,) studied this question.