Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the second volume in the three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin by American historian and Princeton Professor of History Stephen Kotkin. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 was originally published in October 2017 by Penguin Random House and then as an audiobook in December 2017 by Recorded Books. The first volume, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House and the third and final volume, Miscalculation and the Mao Eclipse is scheduled to be published after 2020. The work is both a political biography recounting Stalin's life in the context of his involvement in Russian and later Soviet history and to a lesser degree a personal biography, detailing his private life, connecting it to his public life as revolutionary, leader, and dictator. The Independent writes in its review, Kotkin's biography "tends to history rather than biography." Synopsis Mark Atwood Lawrence in his review of Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 for The New York Times, quotes Winston Churchill's 1939 assessment about understanding Stalin's Soviet Union: "It is," Churchill said, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". In defiance of Churchill's assessment, Stephen Kotkin's attempts to unravel and understand Stalin and his Soviet Union in the second of a three-volume biography of Stalin. In the first volume of Kotkin's biography, he detailed how the world that Stalin was born into molded his personality and shaped his views as he developed into the person who would in turn mold the Bolshevik party and shape the Soviet government, both of which he would come to dominate. In this second volume, Kotkin begins to explore and understand the person who had come to dominate party and government and his evolution from dictator to despot, from a ruthless and brutal revolutionary into a mass murderer and architect of genocide. Mark Atwood Lawrence quotes directly from Kotkin, "The dictator believed, Kotkin contends, that the world’s most powerful countries "achieved and maintained their great-power status by mastery of a set of modern attributes: mass production, mass consumption, mass culture, mass politics." Scope This volume spans the period from 1929, with the destruction of the Right Opposition and ends with the impending NaziSoviet war in 1941. Kotkin creates the biography around three sections, covering the three major events that unfolded for the Soviet Union during 1929-1941: the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s and the accompanying drive