On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics - Hardcover

Fitzpatrick, Sheila

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691145334 ISBN 13: 9780691145334

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men and political window dressing. On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin was a group of loyal men who formed a remarkably effective team with him from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Drawing on extensive original research, Sheila Fitzpatrick provides the first in-depth account of this inner circle and their families, vividly describing how these dedicated comrades-in-arms not only worked closely with Stalin, whom they both feared and admired, but also constituted his social circle. Readers meet the wily security chief Beria, whom the rest of the team quickly had executed following Stalin's death; Stalin's number-two man, Molotov, who continued on the team even after his wife was arrested and exiled; the charismatic Ordzhonikidze, who ran the country's industry with entrepreneurial flair; Andreev, who traveled to provincial purges while listening to Beethoven on a portable gramophone; and Khrushchev, who finally disbanded the team four years after Stalin's death. Among the book's surprising findings are that Stalin almost always worked with the team on important issues and that after his death the team managed a brilliant transition to a reforming collective leadership. Taking readers from the cataclysms of the Great Purges and World War II to the paranoia of Stalin's final years, On Stalin's Team paints an entirely new picture of Stalin within his milieu--one that transforms our understanding of how the Soviet Union was ruled during much of its existence.

About this title

Review:

"On Stalin's Team is an utterly absorbing and sometimes blood-curdling account of the domestic and office life of the most bourgeois of proletarian dictators. Sheila Fitzpatrick's group biography of Stalin's inner circle of meritocratic bureaucrats and squalid mobsters is unputdownable."--Bernard Wasserstein, author of Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time

"On Stalin's Team is an extremely readable, lively, and exciting account of the lives and work of the men who were closest to the unpredictable dictator. The reader is a kind of voyeur, peeking into the personal and political relationships of powerful people who worked together on a knife's edge. It is hard not to become fascinated by these characters, whose portraits Sheila Fitzpatrick so deftly draws in this seductive book. Her scholarship is impeccable and the stories she tells are dramatic, engrossing, and tragic."--Ronald Grigor Suny, author of The Soviet Experiment

"This important book focuses on the team led by Stalin and on its members' relationships with him and each other: the Politburo after hours, as it were. Here we have fascinating details about real people with recognizable personalities, likes and dislikes, and wives and children. Written in an attractive style, this book should have a broad audience."--J. Arch Getty, author of Practicing Stalinism

"Co-Winner of the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, Australian Government Department of Communications and the Arts"

"2015 Silver Winner in History, ForeWord Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards"

"Honorable Mention for the 2016 PROSE Award in Government & Politics, Association of American Publishers"

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2016"

"Though there have been a number of fine studies of Stalin and his henchmen in the past few years, On Stalin's Team offers new insight into the complex group dynamics that sustained his political power for so long."---Rachel Polonsky, Times Literary Supplement

"One of the most novel sections of the book is the chapter on how the ruling group fared without Stalin. Fitzpatrick shows the team managing the post-Stalin transition remarkably well, not only maintaining stability but even launching a raft of reforms. Building on a recent vein of scholarship, she suggests that they were able to do this precisely because they had already consolidated as a group under the dictator."---Yoram Gorlizki, London Review of Books

"A superb group portrait of the dictator's closest lieutenants at a pivotal moment in history."---Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal

About the Author:

Sheila Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of Sydney, professor emerita at the University of Chicago, and the author of many books on the Soviet Union, including The Russian Revolution, Everyday Stalinism, Tear Off the Masks! (Princeton), and a memoir of Moscow in the 1960s, A Spy in the Archives.

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0691145334
• ISBN 13: 9780691145334
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384