Stephen Kotkin
Born
in Englewood, New Jersey, The United States
February 17, 1959
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Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
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Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941
14 editions
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published
2017
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Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000
26 editions
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published
2001
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Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
13 editions
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published
1995
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Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment
by
14 editions
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published
2009
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Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era
7 editions
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published
1991
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The Collapse of the Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction
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published
2002
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Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan
9 editions
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published
1999
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Political Corruption in Transition: A Sceptic's Handbook
by
3 editions
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published
2002
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Rediscovering Russia in Asia: Siberia and the Russian Far East
10 editions
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published
1995
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“Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.”
― Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
― Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
“What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.”
― Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
― Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
“That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world’s strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and journalist,” and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father’s engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor—commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman. Now,”
― Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
― Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
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