Stalin, The History of a Dictator

Stalin, The History of a Dictator, by H. Montgomery Hyde (Farrar, 679 pp., $12.95). This Stalin does not really add much to the literature, except to shed a tiny bit more light on Stalin’s personal life, particularly in relation to his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who committed suicide in 1932. The long-rumored connection of Stalin with the czarist Okhrana before 1912 is carried no further than Isaac Don Levine carried it in his Stalin’s Great Secret published in 1956; it still seems likely from the whole pattern of Stalin’s arrests and releases that the allegations have truth, but Levine has since concluded that the actual Okhrana letter, which he published in good faith, was a forgery, even though its contents may have been accurate. Mr. Hyde is a diligent and competent journalist but not a historian; the political dimension of Stalin’s story is extrinsic trimming in his account.

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E. B. Meyer

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Stalin, The History of a Dictator, by H. Montgomery Hyde (Farrar, 679 pp., $12.95). This Stalin does not really add much to the literature, except to shed a tiny bit more light on Stalin’s personal life, particularly in relation to his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who committed suicide in 1932. The long-rumored connection of Stalin with the czarist Okhrana before 1912 is carried no further than Isaac Don Levine carried it in his Stalin’s Great Secret published in 1956; it still seems likely from the whole pattern of Stalin’s arrests and releases that the allegations have truth, but Levine has since concluded that the actual Okhrana letter, which he published in good faith, was a forgery, even though its contents may have been accurate. Mr. Hyde is a diligent and competent journalist but not a historian; the political dimension of Stalin’s story is extrinsic trimming in his account.