Summary
Service is often an awkward and jerky writer, and his efforts to rise above the pedestrian produce unfortunate sentences such as: "The Lenin cult glistened like a film of oil over the dark ocean of Soviet reality." His book will do little to diminish the paperback sales of Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: the court of the red tsar, last year's offering on the subject.
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Extract
Lenin's Wonderful Georgian
Lenin's wonderful Georgian Stalin: a biography Robert Service Macmillan, 715pp, £25
Visiting Tbilisi long years ago, I asked confidently if I could see the bank in Yerevan Square that was robbed by Stalin and his friends in 1907, imagining that it might well be a tourist attraction. Blank faces all round. The famous Georgian ...See the full content of this document
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