''To recount the story of Stalin's rise
to power during the 1920's from the
point of view of one of his Politburo
associates, later shot, would seem to
be an immodest undertaking for one not
dedicated to the field. I didn't plan
it that way. One sunny afternoon in
the summer of 1977, at Pete's Harbor
off San Francisco Bay, I was reading
an excellent biography of Stalin by
H. Montgomery Hyde.
I was astonished to learn that Stalin
had made an insulting and vulgar telephone
call to Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya
in December 1922, shortly after Lenin
had suffered a major stroke. One would
have expected sympathy, or at least
civility, to be the order of the day,
and Stalin's abuse of Krupskaya appeared
to be the act of an irrational man.
I wanted to know more. By the spring
of 1983 I had exhausted the supply
of books on Stalin and related subjects
at the Palo Alto city library and
was given access to the archives of
the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. Here was one of the world's
foremost collections of material on
Tsarist Russia, the Bolshevik Party,
and the Soviet Union.
It was an immense and under-utilised
treasure. Some of the books and documents
I obtained had not circulated in almost
half a century.
During the next ten years a story
began to form in my mind - the story
of how Joseph Stalin, an Old Bolshevik
of plain appearance, average speaking
ability, and moderate intelligence,
evolved into the greatest autocrat,
and in my estimation the greatest
criminal, of all time. This book is
not, however, an account of Stalin's
crimes.
Those have already been well-documented
by such authors as Robert Conquest.
Instead, what I present here is a
straightforward narrative of the steps
by which Stalin rose to heights beyond
the mortal''.
