provisional government to Lenin’s Soviet Union." The world that Stalin developed in In the first part of the volume, Kotkin explores the world that Ioseb Jugashvili developed in and details how this world was the primary force that transformed him into the person of Joseph Stalin. The author takes time to detail the various circumstances in Russia that impacted Stalin's development, such as the impact of the 1905-06 revolution, the unfolding disaster Russia faced in World War I, and the poverty and hopelessness of the average Russian worker, soldier, and sailor. In the Slavic Review, Lewis H. Siegelbaum comments, "Kotkin insists on presenting a panoply of structural forces and contingencies. Among the former is the Russian autocratic system and its fitful modernizations; the "European castle-in-the air project of socialism" and its bastardized Bolshevik version; global geopolitics; world war and the destruction of belligerent empires.". Writing about Kotkin's approach to writing his biography, Vladislav Zubok states, "The book deals with big concepts: Soviet Eurasia, revolution, mass politics, ideology, modernization, and geopolitics. Yet in the end, the biographer places an individual squarely in the centre of history. Dzhugashvili-Stalin himself is the key answer to ‘paradoxes of power’. While structural causes and challenges explain much of Russian history, only individual decisions and contingencies determined the course of events." Many commentators have noted that the person of Stalin is present only as a supporting player in the first half of the book. Stalin's personal life, family, and education receive only the minimal attention needed to place him in the world Kotkin describes. Stalin and the world he helped shape Transitioning into the second half of the work, which is more biographical, but still fundamentally more history than biography, Kotkin provides the reader with a view of how Stalin both worked within and transformed the Bolshevik party after the October Revolution and mastered the regime’s ever evolving power structures. In a major contrast with the first half of the book, Kotkin here shows how Stalin was not molded by the circumstances he found himself in, but rather molded those circumstances and shaped the events unfolding around him to facilitate his rise to power. He shows Stalin to be a true student of Lenin method of leadership: an uncompromising class warrior with a complete lack of willingness to compromise with resolute ideological conviction. Hiroaki Kuromiya writes, "Without Stalin, the Soviet Union would have been utterly different.