SUMMARY:

In his survey review article, Ronald Suny analyzes various approaches taken by historians to the biography of Iosif Stalin. He situates biographical studies of Stalin on a continuum of historical reflections that stretches from neglect of the individual features of historical actors in structuralist or Marxist methodologies to an overemphasis on individual and psychological features (to the neglect of socioculturally constructed biographies) in the Freudian tradition and studies of psycho-history. This survey of historical research that directly or indirectly pertains to reconstruction of Stalin's biography starts with the first attempts of Leon Trotsky and Boris Souvarin and ends with contemporary writings, including those of Simon Sebag Montefiore. Suny strongly criticizes the prevalence of psychoanalytical approaches to Stalin's biography that retain the reductionist core of their methodological point of departure, which results in neglect of the contextual and socioculturally embedded paths of lived lives. However, he also notes, with reference to Peter Gay, that even those historians who are not shaped by the psychoanalytic tradition also tend to resort to a one-cause, unidimensional frame of interpretation of Stalin's biography. This reductionism is unveiled by the author in his analysis of the most recent biographies of Stalin by Montefiore.