Stalin in Power

The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941

By: Robert C. Tucker

Narrated by: Paul Woodson

In 1929, Stalin plunged Soviet Russia into a coercive "revolution from above", a decade-long effort to amass military-industrial power for a new war. He forced 25 million peasant families into state-run collectives and transformed the Communist Party into a servile instrument. In 1939, he concluded the pact with Hitler that enabled him to grasp at Eastern Europe while Hitler made war in the West.

This book forms the second volume of Robert C. Tucker's biography of Joseph Stalin, following Stalin as Revolutionary. The author shows that Stalin was a Bolshevik of the radical right whose revolution cast the country deep into its imperial, autocratic past.

Tucker brings a fresh analysis to these events and to the terror of the 1930s, revealing the motives and methods of what he calls the greatest murder mystery of this century.

©1990 Robert C. Tucker (P)2021 Tantor

Extensive research

Loved the narrator and the detailed historical narrative! Thank you for this fine volume Robert Tucker…it’s been a joy listening and learning about

Great information a little boring

It’s hard to truly just listen to the book for me without doing something else, idk what it is but it feels slow.

good narrative

liked the the unbiased depiction of historical facts and perspectives of the personalities and their flaws

How to become a dictator

The structure of the book would probably have been better looking at print. I feel that I now know all the folks he had killed on his way up.

Deeply Unserious

The only conspiracies that took place in the Soviet Union were those concocted by Stalin. Stalin concocted these plots because (although he was the supreme autocratic dictator) he needed to eliminate those who disagreed with his ‘inner image’ of himself as a wise, authoritative leader. He also needed to eliminate any rivals who disagreed with his policy of alliance with his best friend and ideological compatriot AH (Austrian mustache man), whose ideology inspired Stalin’s National Bolshevism.

Read Kotkin, Losurdo, Getty, etc. instead of this tripe. The audiobook performance itself was perfectly acceptable.