Bookish Diversions: Despotic Bookworm

Stalin the Reader, Literature and Humanity, Finding Just the Right Word, Disposing Books, More

¶ Despotic bookworm. A new portrait of Josef Stalin exposes an underreported side of his character. “Americans usually presume that Stalin, as a mass murderer, must have been a semi-literate thug,” says Gary Saul Morson, “as if intellectuals are somehow less capable of brutality. At best, they figure that Stalin, as his enemy Trotsky asserted, was a con…