Stalin, like the other ‘evil dictators’ of the twentieth century, remains the subject of enduring public fascination. Academic attention, however, has shifted away from the study of ‘Great Men’, including Stalin, towards the little men and women, such as the now celebrated Stepan Podlubnyi, and towards Stalinist political culture more generally. Ironically this is at a time when we have unprecedented access to hitherto classified material on Stalin, the individual. The object of this volume is to reinvigorate scholarly interest in Stalin, his ideas, and the nature of his power. Although Stalin certainly did not single-handedly determine everything about the set of policies, practices, and ideas we have come to call Stalinism, it is now indisputable that in many respects his influence was decisive. A clearer understanding of his significance will allow more precise analysis of the origins and nature of Stalinism itself.

The contributors to the volume do not subscribe to any single ‘model’. Instead, they share a common agenda: to examine the new archival materials, as well as the old, with the aim of rethinking some of the stereotypes and assumptions about Stalin that have accumulated in the historiography. The vast literature on Stalin is of varying quality, including journalistic speculations, sensationalist potboilers, and political diatribes, as well as the important studies by Isaac Deutscher, Robert Tucker, and others. Much of the work to date has been affected by both limited access to primary sources and the unusually intense politicisation of the field of Soviet studies.