Most elusive and obscure have been Stalin’s early years – before he was Stalin. Here the lasting fascination with the demon dictator is matched by an irresistible temptation to make his childhood and youth “useful” by investing them with the first signs of the paranoid revolutionary-from-above of the 1930s, the arch criminal who presided over the death of millions.
Those who “know” the autocratic Stalin of totalitarian Russia have read back the characteristics of the General Secretary into the young Stalin, emphasising what fits --violence, paranoia, arrogance, and the need to dominate -- and rejecting what does not --romanticism, literary sensibility, love for his homeland, and revolutionary idealism.
Ronald Grigor Suny has attempted to illuminate the formation of Stalin as a revolutionary by placing him in his Caucasian setting, his Georgian upbringing, and the various cultures he moved through.
Bio
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY is William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.
He was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, where he foundedand directed the Armenian Studies Program. He is author of numerous books including Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History; The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union; “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A history of the Armenian Genocide; Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution; Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment; Stalin: Passage to Revolution; and co-author with Valerie Kivelson of Russia’s Empires.
He is currently working on a book on the recent upsurge of exclusivist nationalisms and authoritarian populisms, Forging the Nation: The Making and Faking of Nationalisms.
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Meeting ID: 881 2139 2674
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