The ebb and flow of debate about Stalin's Russia is brilliantly captured
in Chris Ward's account, which not only conceptualises the field in a
clear and helpful way, offering a synthesis of the vast secondary
literature in the area, but also provides the author's own evaluation of
the key issues at stake. The first edition of the book was deservedly
popular with readers wanting a succinct introduction to the subject or
needing to 'get up to speed' in areas of the subject unfamiliar to them.




This edition retains all the virtues of the first but is able to
take more account of the new opportunities afforded to historians - both
Russian and Western - by the collapse of Communism and the greater
availability to researchers of archival sources. This is a valuable
revision of a now standard work, acknowledging the various problems and
perspectives in interpretation that have emerged since the end of the
Soviet Union and including for the first time a chapter on Stalin's
foreign policy.