Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 is the first volume in the three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin by American historian and Princeton Professor of History Stephen Kotkin. It was originally published in November 2014 by Penguin Random House and as an audiobook in December 2014 by Recorded Books. The second volume, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941, was published in 2017 by Penguin Random House. Synopsis This first volume details Stalin's life from his birth through his rise to power within the Bolshevik party in 1928. Paradoxes of Power can be viewed as having two halves: the first half where the world Stalin developed in is explored, the state of Russian society, the Russo-Japanese war, World War I, and other forces changing Russia. In this section, Stalin as an individual plays only a minor role compared to the world around him. The second half of the book shifts to focus on the revolutionary movement, the revolution itself, and the development of Bolshevik power and Stalin's place in it. In this half Stalin emerges from the background and his role in the revolution and his rise to power with the paradoxes that accompanied it are the focus. The book's appendix contains categorized bibliography. Biography and history The work is both a political biography recounting his life in the context of his involvement in Russian and later Soviet history, and to a lesser degree a personal biography, detailing Stalin's private life and connecting it to his public life as revolutionary, leader and dictator. The Independent writes in their review, Kotkin's biography "tends to history rather than biography" and Hiroaki Kuromiya writes, "the book is more a “marriage of biography and history". Paradoxes of Power stands out as part biography and part history, and finds a unique place among the many biographies of Stalin. In a review of Paradoxes of Power, The Guardian states "It feels not so much like a biography of the man as a biography of the world in his lifetime." Ronald Grigor Suny writes that Kotkin "details better than any previous account the viciousness that brought down Stalin’s opponents, one after the other, with these personal conflicts obscuring the original aims of the revolution." Writing in the Historian, Martin H. Folly writes "His main concern is political rather than biographical, and from the start he looks to set Stalin in a broad context of the crisis of Russia from tsarism to