STALIN

A somewhat superficial, but eminently readable, portrait of today's man of destiny. A sympathetic interpretation of the man who achieved the founding of the Soviet Union, ""the greatest event produced by our century today"", -- a man without nerves, with greek cumulative energy, silent, decisive, evasive, strong. Ludwig sketches his childhood of privation, his early revolutionary activities, in which he followed rather than led; his rise to power under Lenin, in juxtaposition with Trotsky, his superior. Finally, with Lenin's death, his accession to power. He shows his many sided accomplishments, as coloniser of a backward country which he remade into an industrial power, he shows him as legislator, as diplomat (rebuffed by the democracies he sought to join). Ludwig bases his personal impressions on a three-hour interview back in 1934 -- the rest of the material is passable journalese, along rather typical Ludwig lines of popularization.