Mark Atwood Lawrence in his review of Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941" for the New York Times, quotes Winston Churchill's 1939 assessment about understanding Stalin's Soviet Union: "It is," Churchill said, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma".
In defiance of Churchill's assessment, Stephen Kotkin's attempts to unravel and understand Stalin and his Soviet Union in the second of a three-volume biography of Stalin.

In the first volume of Kotkin's biography, he detailed how the world that Stalin was born into molded his personality and shaped his views as he developed into the person who would in turn mold the Bolshevik party and shape the Soviet government, both of which he would come to dominate.
In this second volume, Kotkin begins to explore and understand the person who had come to dominate party and government and his evolution from dictator to despot, from a ruthless and brutal revolutionary into a mass murderer and architect of genocide.
Mark Atwood Lawrence quotes directly from Kotkin, "The dictator believed, Kotkin contends, that the world’s most powerful countries "achieved and maintained their great-power status by mastery of a set of modern attributes: mass production, mass consumption, mass culture, mass politics.""
Mark Atwood Lawrence in his review of Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941" for the New York Times, quotes Winston Churchill's 1939 assessment about understanding Stalin's Soviet Union: "It is," Churchill said, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". In defiance of Churchill's assessment, Stephen Kotkin's attempts to unravel and understand Stalin and his Soviet Union in the second of a three-volume biography of Stalin.
In the first volume of Kotkin's biography, he detailed how the world that Stalin was born into molded his personality and shaped his views as he developed into the person who would in turn mold the Bolshevik party and shape the Soviet government, both of which he would come to dominate. In this second volume, Kotkin begins to explore and understand the person who had come to dominate party and government and his evolution from dictator to despot, from a ruthless and brutal revolutionary into a mass murderer and architect of genocide. Mark Atwood Lawrence quotes directly from Kotkin, "The dictator believed, Kotkin contends, that the world’s most powerful countries "achieved and maintained their great-power status by mastery of a set of modern attributes: mass production, mass consumption, mass culture, mass politics.""
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941