No.5715
I read young Stalin and it reads like gossip. Everything has to either resort to his sexual relationships, his relationship with his parents and how much his "innate tyrant" was formed in these years preluding revolution. For that he refers to anecdotes of friends and enemies. So it isn't a history book, it's more of a pop-psychology book. And it is the type of pop-psychology that liberals really dig, because it leaves out the political transformation and only concerns itself with his character traits and who he fucked with.
One passage talks about how someone witnessed Stalin talk about emulating Napoleon at a party. Like…jesse wtf are you talking about? What do you want us to tell here? His political journey is pretty much reduced to "he worked at his fathers shoe factory and then he learned to hate capitalism, joined the bolsheviks and killed gazillions people". If you want some anecdotal evidence of Stalin's fetishes, tastes in wine and what films he liked, then please read his books. But if you want a mainstream historian talking about Stalin with an "unbiased" view, go read Kotkin