Review: I Knew Stalin, by Anatole V. Baikaloff

No, he didn’t. The author of this short book, a former Bolshevik, apparently met Stalin briefly before the 1917 revolution, and says that the man didn’t make much of an impression. The remaining 90% of the book consists of an unoriginal rant about how evil Stalin was. Like other books of its time (this was published in 1940), the idea that Stalin had been a secret agent of the tsarist police seems quite a reasonable one.