On Stalin's Team Paperback / softback - 2017

"On Stalin's Team is an utterly absorbing and sometimes blood-curdling account of the domestic and office life of the most bourgeois of proletarian dictators. Sheila Fitzpatrick's group biography of Stalin's inner circle of meritocratic bureaucrats and squalid mobsters is unputdownable."--Bernard Wasserstein, author of Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time

"On Stalin's Team is an extremely readable, lively, and exciting account of the lives and work of the men who were closest to the unpredictable dictator. The reader is a kind of voyeur, peeking into the personal and political relationships of powerful people who worked together on a knife's edge. It is hard not to become fascinated by these characters, whose portraits Sheila Fitzpatrick so deftly draws in this seductive book. Her scholarship is impeccable and the stories she tells are dramatic, engrossing, and tragic."--Ronald Grigor Suny, author of The Soviet Experiment

"This important book focuses on the team led by Stalin and on its members' relationships with him and each other: the Politburo after hours, as it were. Here we have fascinating details about real people with recognizable personalities, likes and dislikes, and wives and children. Written in an attractive style, this book should have a broad audience."--J. Arch Getty, author of Practicing Stalinism