Stalin, ideologue and opportunist

Book review of 'Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941'

STALIN

Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 

Stephen Kotkin 

Penguin Press

1,154 pages; $40

Dictators lend themselves to caricature. We label them sociopaths, paranoiacs or just victims of bad childhoods. We flatten them in order to explain our own times. Saddam Hussein is Hitler; Vladimir Putin is Peter the Great; Donald Trump is Mussolini. Sometimes, we are told, they simply defy explanation. In a 1939 radio address, Winston Churchill conceded defeat in his efforts to understand Stalin’s Soviet Union. “It is,” Churchill said, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Stephen Kotkin demolishes such simplicities in his monumental