Reddit reviews Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator

Hi! I agree with Lieutenant_Lukin, that Stalin is indeed a very debatable historical figure. In my experience, I never met a person who has a firm view of Stalin. Most of them tend to talk like "yeah, there were a lot of terrible things at Stalin's time, but at the same time, there were many real gooв things. So... I don't know. It's too complicated to say if he was clearly bad or clearly good"


I can recommend you to read this book if you are really interested to find out more about him.
The author tries to be impartial, that a reader can to choose independently how to feel about that.

"Сталин. Жизнь одного вождя" (Олег Хлевнюк).
If you can read in Russian you may get it here - http://flibustahezeous3.onion/b/399093

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In English, it's titled "Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator" by Oleg V. Khlevniuk. You can get it here - https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Biography-Dictator-Oleg-Khlevniuk/dp/0300219784

Great that you're on Getty now. You're going to want to also check out Wendy Z. Goldman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Ronald Grigor Suny, other leaders of the "revisionist" school of Soviet Historiography who re-evaluated a lot of Cold War assumptions about Soviet politics.

Probably the best non-revisionist Soviet historian, Oleg Khlevniuk has a liberal bias but his 2015 book provides so much information that you'll learn a lot if you maintain a critical eye.