Stalin's World

Dictating the Soviet Order

Davies Sarah, Harris James

Drawing on declassified material from Stalin's personal archive, this is the first systematic attempt to analyze how Stalin saw his world – both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Stalin rarely left his offices and viewed the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters and books. Analyzing these materials, Sarah Davies and James Harris provide a new understanding of Stalin's thought process and leadership style and explore not only his perceptions and misperceptions of the world but the consequences of these.

About the Author

Sarah Davies is senior lecturer in history in the Department of History at Durham University.

James Harris is senior lecturer in modern European history at the University of Leeds.

Reviews

"Davies and Harris are THE specialists on Stalin's personal archive, which contains the dictator's notes, rough drafts and correspondence. They present a careful study of how Stalin processed information in areas ranging from terror to art, foreign policy to leadership technique, class to cults of personality. This will be the standard scholarly work on Stalin for years to come" – J. Arch Getty, author of "Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition"

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