Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer
    Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer
    Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer
    Audiobook2 hours

    Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer

    Written by Paul Johnson

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Paul Johnson, the most celebrated popular historian of our time, takes a scalpel to Stalin, whom he considers “one of the outstanding monsters of history.” Johnson sets forth the essence of Stalin’s life, character, and career. “It has been a hateful task, which has caused me much pain and disgust,” he writes with characteristic candor. “But it has been a duty I have performed not without a certain grim satisfaction.” Stalin poses a particular challenge to a biographer: How does one render such a monster human? While Johnson doesn’t flinch from chronicling Stalin’s rise to absolute power—the remorseless vendetta against Leon Trotsky, the development of the Gulag, the extermination of millions of peasants—he also shows Stalin playing billiards, listening to his adored Mozart, and annotating Marx’s Capital in the margins. It is, in concise form, the story of Russia in the twentieth century: dark and murderous, a stage on which to display humanity’s infinite capacity for self-destruction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781480578395
    Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer
    Author

    Paul Johnson

    Paul Johnson is a historian whose work ranges over the millennia and the whole gamut of human activities. He regularly writes book reviews for several UK magazines and newspapers, such as the Literary Review and The Spectator, and he lectures around the world. He lives in London, England.

    More audiobooks from Paul Johnson

    Related to Stalin

    Related audiobooks

    Political Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Tragedy of Edmund Morris

      May 28, 2019

      The Tragedy of Edmund Morris
      5 min read

    • Article

      Win A Copy Of Victory To Defeat The British Army 1918-40

      Oct 26, 2023

      At the end of the First World War, the British Army was among the largest and most effective fighting forces in the world. So why, when war returned to Western Europe 20 years later, was it so catastrophically bested by a resurgent German military? T

      1 min read

    • Article

      Tristram And The Tyrants

      Sep 30, 2021

      Tristram And The Tyrants
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Vivid Chronicle Of Chroniclers

      Feb 24, 2022

      AS A PUBLISHING executive, Richard Cohen edited authors such as Jeffrey Archer, John le Carré, and Fay Weldon. As a fencer he competed at three Olympic Games, wrote a history of swordsmanship, and appeared as an extra in the James Bond movie Die Anot

      5 min read

    • Article

      Salvaging Their Stories

      Oct 9, 2021

      Salvaging Their Stories
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Village in the Third Reich

      May 4, 2022

      Elliott & Thompson £25 Take a small English country town – Sherborne, say, or Kendal – picture-postcard cute and surrounded by beautiful landscape. Then imagine it after a defeat in war, a sixth of its men dead, chaos in the capital, hyper-inflation

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sonia Jaffe Robbins

      Dec 14, 2022

      Sonia Jaffe Robbins reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Sonia Jaffe Robbins appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Texan Promised Land

      Mar 6, 2024

      Texan Promised Land
      3 min read

    • Article

      Trapped Between Two Worlds: The Life of John Morris

      Apr 4, 2022

      There is a (now lost) picture of me as an infant in 1952 on my grandfather’s knee, when he was about to turn 90. Even as a teenager, I was thinking, wow, the life this guy lived. The things he lived through and witnessed, and the way his day-to-day l

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Many Holocausts

      Jan 26, 2020

      The Many Holocausts
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois

      Feb 14, 2018

      The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois
      15 min read

    • Article

      A Lost Piece of Trans History

      Jan 15, 2019

      A Lost Piece of Trans History
      7 min read

    • Article

      Enigma From the East

      Dec 3, 2018

      Enigma From the East
      4 min read

    • Article

      America Has Had It Worse

      Nov 2, 2022

      America Has Had It Worse
      6 min read

    • Article

      International Books

      Jan 13, 2020

      Imagining the world in the first century AD (not yet called that), it’s difficult to envision Christianity (not yet called that) when it was considered a “blasphemous cult”. It’s 35AD in Jerusalem and Saul, a Jew, is hunting down Christians for execu

      5 min read

    • Article

      Willing Accomplice

      May 11, 2021

      Willing Accomplice
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Sins Of The Father

      Apr 16, 2020

      Four years ago, the BBC aired a deeply disturbing documentary called My Nazi  Legacy. It followed the journey of Horst Wächter, the son of notorious Nazi leader Otto Wächter, as he visited the places in eastern Europe where his father had presided ov

      4 min read

    • Article

      The World’s Greatest Novel?

      May 8, 2020

      The World’s Greatest Novel?
      2 min read

    • Article

      On Solzhenitsyn’s shoulders

      Oct 28, 2021

      SPEAKING AT THE LONDON GUILDHALL upon receipt of the Templeton Prize in 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dropped a heavy meme on the history of the twentieth century. When he was still a child, he said, he had heard older people saying that all the disas

      8 min read

    • Article

      Literary Deaths of 2022

      Dec 29, 2022

      In 2022, we mourned the deaths of many literary giants who remained under-celebrated in their lifetimes. These are some of them. With his eye patch and no-bullshit demeanor, Andrew Vachss was a man on a mission. He was an author of hard-boiled fictio

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Conversion Of Paul

      Mar 30, 2023

      The Conversion Of Paul
      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Stalin

    4.5/5

    34 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words