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Title: Whitewash?
Review: I agree with the other reviewer of this book. I read this years ago but remember that the point of view of the book was essentially, you have to break eggs to make an omelet and Stalin broke eggs. It gave him a lot of credit for industrializing Russia, and didn't dwell on the millions killed. Since this book came out, much research has been done. Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror and Anne Applebaum's book The Gulag fill things in...to say nothing of Solzhenitsyn. There must be another bio of Stalin out by now that takes into account how much more we know about Stalin's totalitarian regime now. And Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism came out before the Deutscher book, so it's not as if no one knew even then what he was about. Admittedly, I read this bio years ago, but I found it flawed in its apologetic slant then and that's how I remember it, and I'm not someone who sees pinko-commies behind the shrubbery.
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