The Death of Stalin
If tragedy plus time is comedy, then what does comedy become? Insight? Farce? Revelation? It depends on what and who is writing about it. If the anglophone world’s best historian of the Soviet Union takes over from Britain’s sharpest satirist to deal with the death of a dictator, the stakes run high.
The Death of Stalin is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s 30th book in a career that has repudiated top-down monolithic Cold War models to develop an entire school dedicated to understanding the Soviet Union as...