Readers plunging into Stephen Kotkin’s “Stalin: Paradoxes of Power” expecting a detailed dissection of the cobbler’s son and seminarian from Georgia who evolved into the monster called Stalin may be disconcerted to find that, as a boy called Iosif Dzhugashvili (Jughashvili in this book), he plays a relatively minor role in early chapters.

The narrative focuses largely on the disintegration of czarist Russia. What we do learn about the life of Soso, as Stalin’s family referred to him, is served up as a relatively acceptable childhood given the time and place, denouncing the popular Freudian analyses that spot early evidence of a psychopath stemming from his absentee father, physical defects, beatings, religious education or doting mother.

But “Stalin” is far more than the story of the man. “Paradoxes of Power,” even at almost 1,000 pages, is only the first of three volumes that, in Mr. Kotkin’s somewhat understated explanation, tell “the story of Russia’s power in the world and Stalin’s power in Russia.” Mr. Kotkin’s stunningly ambitious project is nothing less than to write an exhaustive history of Russia and the world around it, from the collapse of the czarist empire through the end of World War II. The first volume ends in 1928 on the eve of the savage collectivization of Russia’s peasant agriculture, with fascism rising to the west.

It becomes immediately clear that Mr. Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton, has done prodigious research, not only among the troves of scholarly works about Stalin but also in the archives that have become accessible since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And while the often intimidating torrent of fact and detail will tax the general reader, there are enough juicy details, colorful personalities and anecdotes to keep the story moving at a lively pace. Ministers of the doomed czarist order, and Nicholas II himself, come to life here, as do peripheral figures like Kaiser Wilhelm II and Benito Mussolini, and, of course, the main figures: Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky and the other young Bolshevik zealots who somehow navigated through the rubble of czarism and war to create a revolutionary state, only to hand it in the end to Stalin.