BOOK REVIEW: Stalin: Passage to Revolution

By Ronald Grigor Suny. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Hard cover, with index and notes, 857 pp. US$26.95 on Amazon

Historians have estimated that Josef Stalin directly ordered the murders of as many as 6 million people. An estimated 20 million in total died in what would be called The Great Terror from starvation, torture, the notorious gulags, purges, and confessions. But Russian communism shook the world, was largely responsible for defeating the Nazis at a terrib…