easily up there with Rabinowitch in terms of the best histories of the Russian Revolution and its leadership. it is let down its juvenile tendency to dunk on the likes of Lenin, Trotsky or Bukharin on ideological grounds, because he refuses to take Marxism as a system of thought or beliefs about the nature of society seriously. This would be fine, not every historian could or should be a dialectical materialist, but it inhibits his understanding of differences among the leadership. relatedly, Stalin comes out very well here because he wasn't a theorist in the sense that the above were. Kotkin therefore doesn't feel the need to make fun of him for holding 'messianic' or 'millenarian' views of social change and can just admire his more disinterested ruthless factionalising.

Unfortunately these are all quibbles, it's a very good, fervently anti-communist biography of the man that marshalls quite a lot of information, particularly about the USSR's peripheries, into a very readable format