Man of Steel Joseph Stalin Author:Jules Archer No giant of history has ever been so complex, so shrouded in mystery and contradiction, so baffling to understand, as Joseph Stalin. His biographers have had a difficult time sorting fact from legend because both his enemies and admirers, as well as Stalin himself, did not hesitate to distort events to suit their polemics. Some facts are impos... more »sible to pin down irrefutably because much of working-class life in prerevolutionary Georgia went unrecorded. And not until Stalin was fifty did others who knew him try to recall in print his origins and beginnings. Stalin also deliberately destroyed many historical records and falsified others, even ordering the fakery of photographs, to burnish his image.
The biographer in search of the ewhole truth about Stalin must play literary detective, matching clues from all available evidence, evaluating each source for bias. I have tried to do just that in writing the fascinating life story of the incredible Russian who did more, perhaps, than any other single figure of the twentieth century to change the world we live in.