"Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, ASEEES"

"Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize, Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn trust"

"The book’s strength lies . . . in its excavation of important episodes of the early years. . . . What I took from Passage to Revolution — and I agree with the idea — is that young Stalin was an angry optimist. . . . His hefty, demanding tome emphasizes the effects of changing circumstances that pivoted both Stalin and Russia into a vortex of revolution and civil war."---Robert Service, Washington Post

"Joseph Stalin has been the subject of many biographical studies. . . . Ronald Grigor Suny's ‘Stalin: Passage to Revolution’ is a worthy contribution to this continuing enterprise. . . . In highly readable prose Mr. Suny . . . tells the story of the young Stalin's rise."---Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal

"A Georgianist as well as a Russianist, equally comfortable with social, cultural and political history, Suny outclasses previous biographers of the young Stalin . . . It is a monumental work of history and its treatment and evocation of the young Stalin will never be bettered."---Geoffrey Roberts, Literary Review

"A comprehensive, deeply researched study of one of the world’s most brutal dictators as he took the paths that would lead him to power."---Starred Review, Kirkus

"

This impressively researched biography provides remarkable and reliable details on the first part of Stalin’s life, along with the many fissures among the Left Communists. An important accomplishment.

"

Library Journal, starred review

"Ronald Grigor Suny has written a massive, extensively researched biography of Josef Stalin’s early years—from his childhood days in Gori, Georgia, to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917."---Francis P. Sempa, New York Journal of Books

"Suny, using an abundance of newly available archival material, though there was no secret diary or introspective documents, provides an extraordinary telling, a detailed account, well written and engrossing, of the obscure and multiple layers of experience in Stalin's early life: church school, seminary, outlaw, exile, prison, attraction to Marxism."---Michael Curtis, American Thinker

"He [Suny] is a lucid writer and a perspicacious scholar."---Stephen Lovell, Times Literary Supplement

"The overriding merit of this book is that it takes Stalin seriously. It explains his life and development without feeling the need to impose a value judgement on the reader on every page."---Andrew Murray, Morning Star

"Ronald Grigor Suny has created a detailed and unbiased biography of the first half of Joseph Stalin’s life. . . . one of the best on its subject."---Maria Timofeeva, International Journal of Military History and Historiography IJMH

"This is Suny’s magnum opus, the product of decades of scholarly research."---Duncan Bowie, Chartist