The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin

I ended up majoring in history and going to graduate school for history rather than English but not in Russian history. That was my third year of the PhD program at Berkeley when I was kind of floundering for an advisor. Michel Foucault also had an influence on me the French philosopher who told me it would be interesting to apply his ideas to the study of Stalinism. Four years later I was an assistant professor of Russian history at Princeton University and Martin Malia argued in his book The Soviet Tragedy that because of the Soviet systems need for political and economic totalitarian control it couldn't tap the full reservoir of human potential regardless of propaganda and ideology claiming that it could.