Stalin (Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928) by Stephen Kotkin

    Something disappointing in the book is that there is so little information about Stalin's internal life as a young person. We get a good amount of information, but I think that a lot was censored by Stalin himself or information was otherwise destroyed. One interesting comparison the author makes though is that like Hitler, Stalin nearly joined the church as a young man, and became a nationalist as a teenager. But unlike Hitler, Stalin abandoned Georgian nationalism for socialism. Stalin was a good student, but became a troublemaker. He didn't publish widely until he was a grown man. Kotkin points out that Lenin and Trotsky spent the First World War writing extensively, but that Stalin left no wartime thoughts. 

    My notes in the book tended to be more about the events of Russian history than Stalin's actual life. The main events of his young life seem to be his journey into becoming a communist, joining Lenin's Bolshevik faction, committing various crimes to raise funds for Lenin, and being internally exiled to Siberia during the First World War. While there, he impregnated a thirteen-year-old who he vowed to marry when police intervened, but then betrayed his promise and did not marry her. The child died shortly after birth.

Maybe I will come back to this, but I am going to just publish without any serious notes because I am too busy for this right now.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Over more than four centuries from the time of Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, Russia expanded on average fifty square miles a day.
• As of 1719, Russia was 70% "Great Russian" (a term that excludes the "Little Russians" we call Ukrainians. and more than 85% Slavic, but by the end of the 19th century, Russians were just 44% of the empire and Slavs 73%
• At its height, the Russian Empire had several million more Turkic speakers than the "Turkish" Ottoman Empire due to its sheer size.
• "Bolshevik" means majoritarian and "Menshevik" means minoritarian. This was a big propaganda coup that Lenin achieved after losing a vote at the 1903 Russian socialists' congress, in which he refused to accept the outcome of a vote he lost.

Part III: Collision, page 586

Notes to Page 244