Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941by Stephen KotkinPenguin Press, 2017Stephen Kotkin's 2014 book Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, fast reading and universally praised, painted a horrifyingly detailed portrait of a psychotic coming into full possession of a gigantic nation and turning it to his will. That book, the first in an epic new multi-volume biography of the worst dictator of the 20^th century, was the story of insurgency, betrayal, and domestic terror on a vast scale. Its successor, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, continues the themes of bloodshed and betrayal but places them on a broader international stage. This at once shows Stalin in several new and fascinating lights and highlights to an even greater extent Kotkin's marvelous narrative abilities. In this volume he has as his subject an entire world moving into war, with the Soviet Union playing a pivotal role.The book's subtitle, “Waiting for Hitler,” accurately hints at what readers will find within: two tyrants, not one. The main link is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, in which the Nazis and the Soviets stunned the world by making a separate peace, despite the Russian hunger for eastern territories also coveted by the Nazis and despite Hitler's constant rantings about “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Kotkin comments on how Stalin was “bafflingly slow to come to grips with the centrality of ideology in the Nazi program,” and this book is a long and absorbing account of that coming to grips. This involves Kotkin writing at length about Hitler and his regime, always entertainingly even when there are unsettling echoes and dissonances:

Hitler – who had become a German citizen only in 1932 – was dictator of the country, upending the traditional conservatives. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this government are of a mentality that you or I cannot understand,” the American consul general wrote in a message to the state department. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”

Stalin, ordinarily a ferally quick and accurate judge of character even at great distances, watched Hitler's hysterical speech-making and insatiable aggression with a strange kind of detachment, including Hitler's 1938 seizure of Austria, which Kotkin describes with pointed acerbity:

Rationalizations were to hand. The Versailles peace had been pummeled by pundits as unjust and self-defeating, while state borders in Eastern Europe were widely viewed as arbitrary, including by the Eastern Europeans themselves. What would the powers be shedding blood to defend? All true, but Austria's disappearance should have and could have been stopped. Germany's mobilization was so sudden, ordered by the Führer at 7:00 p.m on March 10, 1938, that it nearly collapsed. “Nothing has been done, nothing at all,” chief of staff General Ludwig Beck fumed of the planning. Only the long lists of Austrian Jews had been meticulously prepared.

In short order, German troops were moving east, massing along borders that Stalin should have seen were clearly jumping-off points for Hitler to tear up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invade the Soviet Union. The implication in most of “Waiting for Hitler” is that Stalin simply couldn't believe the folly of what he was seeing. “The 'parking' of German troops in the east was accelerating, but bombing raids by the Luftwaffe over Britain continued, as Soviet intelligence also reported,” Kotkin writes. “Could Hitler really intend to initiate a two-front war?”Stalin had some personal experience with the fear of two-front wars. He had signed a non-aggression pact with Chiang Kai-shek's China, but since the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, the Empire of Japan had been testing its borders with the Soviet Union – a testing that only increased throughout the 1930s, leading to open hostilities at the end of the decade, hostilities in which Stalin's notorious luck stayed with him:

Japan's cult of fighting “spirit,” its piecemeal commitment of forces, pathetic ground support, inferior ordnance, and poor logistics, combined with its no-surrender doctrine, even in the face of superior firepower, to produce catastrophe. Stalin had always gotten lucky in his nemeses – Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Bukharin, and now the Kwantung Army. He also got lucky in [General Georgy] Zhukov, whom the despot evidently had never even met, but who showed himself a self-assured corps commander whose operational mastery exposed Japan's unsophistication in mobile warfare To be sure, failure for Zhukov at the Halha River could have meant death in NKVD cellars. But then again, that was true for every Soviet commander.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 brings events up to the German invasion of Russia, and the final section of the book is in many ways its most impressive: the End Notes covering pages 912 to 1070 are printed in triple columns of tiny type – essentially, if printed normally, easily enough material to constitute an entire separate book. Even coming after so impressive a narrative as the one Kotkin has crafted, those End Notes are a glorious aria of erudition and sheer wonkish love of the subject matter. Against all odds considering their grim topics, these Stalin volumes from Kotkin, in addition to being definitive, are the kind of infectiously entertaining that only comes from perfect match of topic and storyteller.