![]() ![]() ![]() “The current project is a total history of the regime, almost a history of the world from Stalin’s desk, all based on primary documentation. In a way, it encapsulated the regime itself,” says Kotkin. “Magnetic Mountain was a streetlevel perspective and the total history of a single town - economics, politics, society, culture. The book is about the life and times of Magnitogorsk, the ‘steel heart of the Motherland’ and Stalin’s model town, which was built in the 1930s by peasants dispossessed of their land at the base of a mountain of pure iron ore. Kotkin, who speaks in an unwavering professorial tone, has written several other books on the Soviet Union, including Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, which was released in 1995. The first tome, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, was released in 2014 the second doorstopper, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, is just out in Europe and the United States and he is in the midst of writing the third volume that will end with Stalin’s death and the early years of the Cold War. The result of his hard work is a multi-volume biography of Stalin. For the past thirteen years, he has, in an effort to crack the enigma of evil, sifted through “hundreds of thousands of files” at cavernous archives in Moscow and elsewhere. ![]() The joke probably best illustrates the morbid sense of humour of one of the biggest mass murderers in history, and accentuates the perception of him as being a monster, but Kotkin, who teaches, among others, Soviet history at Princeton University, is not interested in simplistic caricatures. ![]()
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