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 twenty-five 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.
This book forms the second volume of Robert C. Tucker's biography of Joseph Stalin, following Stalin as Revolutionary. The author shows that Stalin was a Bolshevik of the radical right whose revolution cast the country deep into its imperial, autocratic past.
Tucker brings a fresh 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.
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Paul Woodson has lived in the US and England, received a BFA in acting at Boston University, and has been acting and singing since the age of thirteen. He has recorded over one hundred audiobooks, many in the historical romance and Highlander genres, as well as fantasy novels, thrillers, classics, and young adult titles.
Paul Woodson has won SOVAS & Earphones awards, and has recorded close to 350 audiobooks in many different genres—including romance, fiction, history, biography, and mystery—in American and British accents—and received his BFA in acting at Boston University. In his theater days, he worked in many NYC shows, toured the USA and Europe, and starred in NYC as Vincent van Gogh in the sung-through, OOBR Award–winning musical Vincent. He enjoys backpacking the Appalachian Trail and visiting national parks in his spare time. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA.