ABSTRACT
Joseph Stalin chose books according a precise scheme which reflected his political preoccupations. Stalin’s ambitions, avers von Laue, were formed for him, not by him. Like many late-nineteenth century revolutionaries Stalin believed that politics alone could refashion human existence. Robert Tucker’s 1973 essay in psychohistory represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to locate in Stalin’s personality the source of all the horrors which afflicted those who fell under Soviet rule. According to Robert Trotsky by the mid-1930s Stalinism, Stalin’s personality and the totalitarian state formed an unholy trinity, blighting socialism, destroying Bolshevism and deforming the regime. Reading Stalin’s personality as the demiurge of history invites consideration of those qualities which made it possible for him to overpower rivals of seemingly far greater ability and stay at the helm of the party-state for nearly a quarter of a century. Stalin viewed everything that came his way through the prism of a dogmatic, vulgar Marxism.
