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Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books

byGeoffrey Roberts

In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Using biographical detail, personal testimony, and historical context, Stalin’s Library moves between close observation and a wider account of the systems surrounding its subject. By placing Stalin’s Library within biography & autobiography and history, the book reveals why its central tensions extend well beyond one person, place, or moment. Stalin’s Library emphasizes the specific circumstances that made this story possible and the consequences that followed.

Publisher

Yale University Press

Publication date

2022

Format

Print edition

Pages

320

ISBN

9780300179040