Accordingly, the story ‘takes place largely in office, and, indeed, in his mind’. In the period covered by this volume of the biography, Stalin almost never travelled, deriving his information from reading and listening to reports.
Intensely suspicious of almost everyone, he was not suspicious enough about Hitler. Inclined to paranoia, he was still able to keep it under control.
Suspicious of ‘fancy-pants intellectuals’, he was an omnivorous reader whose success in getting the Russian creative intelligentsia into line was ‘uncanny’. Cynical about everyone else’s motives, he himself ‘lived and breathed ideals’. He is pockmarked and physically unimpressive, yet charismatic a gambler, but cautious undeterred by the prospect of mass bloodshed, but with no interest in personal participation.
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