The Unknown Stalin - Tapa dura

"Among their achievements is to place in perspective the new documentation that has, and has not, come to light." "shrewd" "deftly sifts conflicting party-state archives and abundant memoirs" 05/11/04 Times Literary Supplement. Review by Stephen Kotkin "...a brilliant collections of essays unveiling a specific mystery about Stalin by the historian-brothers who produced some of the classics that revealed the dictator's crimes... The best chapters are those on Stalin's death, where they bring to bear their knowledge of how Stalin brought 400,000 of his far eastern troops secretly to save his capital during October 1941." -Simon Sebag Montefiore, FT Magazine Chosen as one of the Daily Telegraphs' "Books of the Year" 2003: "The Unknown Stalin is Zhores and Roy Medvedev's thrilling investigation into Stalin's last secrets, including his death". "A remarkable glimpse at life inside Stalin's Kremlin...This is one of the most remarkable books about Joseph Stalin I have read for many years... superbly translated by a British scholar...What makes this history a fascinating read is that it is not told from the standpoint of Stalin's victims. It is a behind-the-scenes story of what happened on a day-to-day basis inside the Kremlin." -Arnold Beichman, Washington Times 'For those interested in Soviet history and communist this book is a must.' - David Winnick, Tribune

Josef Stalin remains one of the greatest enigmas of modern history. Unflinching, impenetrable, inhuman in his cruelty, bathed in misery himself, he represents to many a very paradigm of evil - perhaps, in his icy rationalism, even more so than Hitler himself. More than a hundred biographies of Stalin have been written since his death in 1953, but this study looks at the torrent of new material unleashed with the opening of the secret Soviet archives when the Union collapsed. The truths extracted from these long-secret archives provide a radically fresh insight into the life and career of one of the major figures of the 20th century.