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In the Shadow of Antichrist: The Old Believers of Alberta. By David Scheffel. Lewiston: Broadview Press, 1991. xvii, 252 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Paper.

Despite such verbal flights of fancy, in my opinion the book displays a kind of interpretive distinction from some of the author's earlier works. Although Conquest has by no means gone soft on communism, the book is short on the repeated manichean characterizations of communism-as-evil that his earlier books used almost as an explanatory vehicle. Instead, we find in Stalin: Breaker of Nations some quite interesting allusions to environmental and social factors in Soviet history. Conquest is right when he points to the inability of partially educated, categorical-minded bolshevik politicians to comprehend social reality. Their narrow faith in a particular kind of nineteenth century science made it difficult for them to distinguish between fact and fantasy. He also realistically portrays a Stalin slow to adapt and adjust, unable to predict the future and (quoting Fedor Raskolnikov) "unable to weigh consequences." Similarly, and quite reasonably, Conquest is wary of making too much of Stalin's presumed childhood psychological traumas, and points out several times that ultimately we cannot know when Stalin decided what, or in general exactly what he thought. (It is, therefore, a bit surprising when in the book Stalin suddenly becomes a careful and brilliant planner of terror in the 1930s, only to lapse again into the willful but often befuddled tsar of the 1940s and early 1950s.) Survey biographies are not likely to please everyone. But there is a place for them in our literature, if for no other reasons than to prevent academics from talking only to each other and to force us to explain things clearly. Even with its flaws, this book is the best short popular biography of Stalin.