Alfred J. Rieber's most recent contribution to the study of the geopolitics of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union focuses on the personality and political views of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. The book begins with Stalin's background in a chapter titled “Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,” a new iteration of Rieber's widely praised and much-quoted article in The American Historical Review (December 2001) under the same title. The book concludes with the end of the Second World War and beginning of the peace. Yet this is not a biography of Stalin by any means. Rieber is too interested in the larger structural and cultural functions of geography for that. More than anything, it is a book about how the Soviet Union met and reacted to the challenges of maintaining and building its power as the pivotal center (à la Sir Halford Mackinder) of the Eurasian heartland. Stalin here is a Bolshevik...

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