<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: This book should be titled "Trotsky is a big fat liar!"
Review: I must admit to being a bit disappointed by this admittedly clever attempt to get to the core of that great enigma, Stalin. Instead of putting Stalin's paranoia of Trotsky in historical perspective (as a tool and excuse for the great purges), he elevates it to an all encompassing compulsion. The whole "autobiography" seems as much a bio of Trotsky as of ol "Uncle Joe" himself. Little attention is paid to Stalin's other paranoias, nor his betrayal by Hitler or his betrayal of "friends" and colleagues, or even his goofy theories on agriculture and science. Even his family issues are largely left untouched. Although occasional glimpes of his well known sadistic humor are scattered throughout, much of his personality goes unexplored while the rest is hijacked by the authors's obsession with Trotsky. Perhaps Lourie will discover the "other" hidden autiobiography of Mr. Stalin. I hope so.
Rating: 
Summary: Inside the mind of one of history's most amoral leaders.
Review: In the last chapter of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH STALIN, it is a week after the August 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, and the Soviet dictator is wrapping up his narrative history of the events that led up to the successful ax murder of his archrival by a conspiracy that he personally directed. In previous chapters, Stalin tells the story of his life as a young boy in Russian Georgia, as a young communist revolutionary, as an associate of Lenin before and after the Revolution, and as the dictator that assumed total power after Lenin's death in 1924 by destroying all of his old Bolshevik comrades. All events are related in the context of his paranoid fear and hatred of Trotsky who, in his Mexican exile, is apparently assembling a biography of the Soviet leader - a biography that will reveal to the world Stalin's ultimate crime against Russia and the Revolution, and which will hopefully spark his downfall. Thus, according to Stalin, the necessity of having to effect Trotsky's murder. (After all, even paranoids have enemies.) Of course, Stalin wrote no autobiography for the world to ponder. This book is a novel written by Richard Lourie. It is absorbing and interesting only to the degree that the facts of Stalin's life and Trotsky's death, as related herein, are historically true. Since Lourie has a Ph.D. in Russian, and has written previously on Russian history, I give him the benefit of the doubt. I was both absorbed and fascinated by the author's Stalin, a personality so isolated and megalomaniacal as to be able to "write" at the very end: "Now I know what my name really means: Stalin is the strength to bear a world in which there is only nothing and yourself. At last I have defeated God at loneliness".
Rating:
Summary: believable biography but unbelievable author
Review: This novel simulates an autobiography of Stalin, over all centered in his obsessive fight against Trotsky, whose murder he's planning during almost all the chapters because he believed Trotsky was the only one that could snatch him the Soviet power. The book seems to me very credible although I don't know so many details about the real, historic Stalin, but as it were I think is good, although it has a trap, and that is the author can't pretend and I think he doesn't, that a cruel dictator and a criminal as Stalin, although very intelligent, could have the sensibility and writing abilities to make an autobiography as this. Perhaps truly Stalin could attain to understand all these that happens in this novel including external facts and internal thoughts, but to expose all these in an intelligible, attractive book, ever for his private use only, is another very different thing.
<< 1 >>
| 
