Ebook: Stalin [English French bilingual edition]

I began to study the life of Stalin and Stalinism almost forty years ago, starting from a few documents or memories selected with parsimonious care by Krushchev’s team. Undoubtedly, they shed light on a few pages of the Guide’s life: the year 1917, the aftermath of Kirov’s murder, the liquidation of his own followers, the war, the last days, but also some aspects of Stalinism. worked on the Bolshevik general staff by publishing, with Georges Haupt, a series of autobiographies and annotated biographies of its principal members2. After a few brief studies on Trotsky and Trotskyism, an obsession of Stalin3, ten years ago, as soon as the archives and mouths opened in Moscow, I tried to study certain periods of existence and of Stalin’s activity: his youth4, which remained very obscure, the deportation of peoples in 1937, 1941, 1943-19445, the liquidation of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in 1948-1952, and the plot of the White Coats in 1952-19536. Archives from the Ministry of the Interior, provided by the Russian historian Podchtchekoldin, had also enabled me to learn about some new aspects of the Gulag and its function in the economy of the USSR under Stalin7.