Stalin set harvest quotas that farmers couldn’t meet; later, during the Terror, he set execution quotas that officials exceeded. Illustration by Henning Wagenbreth

Is there any point to another Stalin biography? Before the opening of the old Soviet archives, three decades ago, the best historians mastered the limited available sources and proceeded to fill in the gaps through inspired guesswork. In addition to genuine insight, this guesswork sometimes involved cross-Atlantic psychoanalysis, including speculations on how Stalin was swaddled as an infant, and could reach the point of imagining his thoughts and putting them in quotation marks.

But the archives—while curbing these excesses, settling old arguments over the precise number of people shot by Stalin’s secret police during the Terror (an astonishing six hundred and eighty-one thousand six hundred and ninety-two), and showing definitively that it was Stalin who signed the execution orders—have not radically altered anyone’s over-all conception of what sort of person Stalin was, or what sort of regime he presided over. The Bolsheviks, we’ve learned, sounded behind closed doors exactly the way they sounded in public. They were what we thought they were.

In the post-Soviet era, the most interesting work on the Stalinist period has been social history, far beyond the Kremlin walls—the study of what one of its leading practitioners, Sheila Fitzpatrick, in her book “Everyday Stalinism,” called “ordinary life in extraordinary times.” With a slight lowering of the ideological temperature, there has been far more willingness to see in the Soviet experiment not just horror and death but good intentions, contradictions, and commonalities with Western modernity. The appearance or reappearance on the map of the post-Soviet republics—in part, as scholars have pointed out, because of the “indigenization” policy instituted by Lenin and Stalin—has also prompted a lot of productive work on the experiences of the Soviet periphery.

One of the most influential of the post-Soviet books was the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin’s “Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization” (1995), a study of the steel city of Magnitogorsk, the U.S.S.R.’s answer to Pittsburgh, as it was constructed in the shadow of the Ural Mountains in the early nineteen-thirties. The book was a sharp-elbowed intervention in the decades-old debate between “totalitarian” historians, who saw in the Soviet Union an omnipotent state imposing its will on a defenseless populace, and “revisionist” historians, who saw a more dynamic and fluid society, with some portion of the population actually supporting the regime. Kotkin’s synthesis was influenced by the philosopher Michel Foucault, who spent several semesters at Berkeley, where Kotkin was a graduate student. Foucault had argued that power did not reside exclusively or even primarily with the state but was disseminated like a web over a society’s institutions. This insight, applied to the Stalinist era, was transformative. Yes, the regime tried to impose its will and its ideas on the population, as the totalitarians had claimed; but also, as the revisionists had counter-claimed, the population was an active participant in and interpreter of this project. With its attention to everyday life, “Magnetic Mountain” was revisionist in form; with its emphasis on ideology (Kotkin’s other influence was Martin Malia, the intellectual historian and ardent cold warrior), it was totalitarian in content. The key theoretical concept was “speaking Bolshevik,” by which Kotkin meant not only the rote language people used to navigate the bureaucracy but also the more evocative language—of “shock work,” “capitalist encirclement,” and, above all, “building socialism”—that people increasingly used to understand themselves and their lives.

Two decades later, Kotkin has seemingly reversed field and produced . . . a Stalin biography. Entering a crowded marketplace, the book makes its mark through its theoretical sophistication, relentless argumentation, and sheer Stakhanovite immensity: two volumes and two thousand closely printed pages in, we’re only up to 1941. (A projected third volume should take us through the war and to Stalin’s death, in 1953.) Kotkin also attempts to answer the chief philosophical question about Stalin: whether the monstrous regime he created was a function of his personality or of something inherent in Bolshevism.

Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph’s mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old. This was a financial blow to the family, but Keke learned how to make dresses and managed to keep Joseph, her only child, in the classroom. He studied first at the local theological school, then at the illustrious theological seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi).

Historians have long wondered whether the eventual mass murderer could be discerned in the Tiflis seminarian. The answer appears to be no. Joseph’s childhood was pretty ordinary for that time and place. His father beat him, but that was standard; he was poor, but relatives and neighbors helped out; he was an outstanding student, and a leader at his school, but he did not stage show trials of any of his classmates. (On swaddling, the jury is still out.)

Young Joseph grew restless at the seminary and was expelled after a series of minor infractions, including the discovery in his possession of a large cache of anti-monarchical literature. He had decided to become a revolutionary, not a priest, but he remained, for the rest of his life, a voracious and attentive reader. He rose through the ranks of the Georgian revolutionary movement, impressing Lenin, then in European exile, with his strident articles and his intrigues against rival socialist factions. As a rebellious youth at the seminary, he had adopted a nickname, Koba, after an outlaw character from a popular nineteenth-century Georgian novel, and he was an effective sometime organizer of the “expropriations”—often of bank wagons transporting cash—with which the revolutionary movement tried to finance itself. The British journalist and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, in his vivid “Young Stalin,” depicted him as a “gangster godfather” and “prolific lover.”

Kotkin has no patience for this sort of thing. “Stalin had a penis, and he used it” is about the extent of his commentary on Stalin’s romantic exploits, and neither does he have any interest in Stalin as a gangster godfather. Stalin’s primary contribution to the movement, Kotkin maintains, was through his organizing work and his pen—it was to sign an article he wrote on socialism and nationalism that he came up with “Stalin,” after the Russian word for “steel.” Young Stalin developed a clear, catechistic style, and was adept at boiling down complex ideas into simple binaries and folksy fables. That he was a little rougher around the edges than some of the bespectacled Jewish intellectuals who filled the ranks of the early Russian socialist movement was more a testament to the fact that they were bespectacled Jewish intellectuals than that Stalin was particularly thuggish. Perhaps the most telling detail found in the archives about the young Stalin comes from a tsarist secret-police characterization that has him behaving “in a highly cautious manner, always looking over his shoulder as he walks.” He was careful, well organized, and totally committed. His various activities landed him in prison several times and finally earned him, in 1913, a sentence to Siberian exile, where he remained until the fall of the tsarist autocracy, in February, 1917.

The sudden collapse of the monarchy that had ruled Russia for three hundred years led to chaos. Russia immediately became, as one participant put it, “the freest country in the world.” The political prisoners were free; the Pale of Settlement was obliterated; and the independence-minded peoples on the Russian periphery—including the Poles, the Balts, the Georgians, and the Ukrainians—were no longer captive. As the great literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, then serving in the Russian Army in Persia, put it, “The show ‘Russia’ was over; everyone was hurrying to get his hat and coat.” Unfortunately, nobody had called off the First World War, and Russia was still fighting the Central Powers. The post-February governments—shifting coalitions of liberal gentry and socialist reformers—decided, fatefully, to stay the course.