Richard Lourie’s The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel (1999) offers a portrait of a leader whose cool logic successfully masks his homicidal paranoia. It is 1938, and Stalin has learned that the man who haunts him like a classical nemesis, Leon Trotsky, is writing a biography of him. Haunted by the fear that in his research, Trotsky will uncover the one fact that could bring about his downfall, Stalin begins to record the events of his life. He writes, not in defense, but in celebration of the supremacy of will that has enabled him to penetrate to the essence of life, which is to say, his sense of the essential nothingness that underlies existence.

He describes his brutal childhood, where his father, a drunken lout, jealous of his son’s early academic success, repeatedly beat and humiliated him. From there, Stalin records the central event of his adolescence: his challenge to God to prove his existence by taking his soul immediately. When the challenge goes unanswered, the young seminary student is confirmed in his atheism, free to pursue power untrammeled by conscience.

His rise in the revolutionary party is assured when he convinces Lenin that he is the man to initiate the policy of “expropriation” (organized robberies) to support the work of the party. The novel ends with Stalin’s crowning achievement, his carefully orchestrated assassination of Trotsky at his home in Mexico. It comes just as Stalin’s worst fear has been realized: Trotsky has discovered that Lenin did not die from a series of strokes as was generally believed, but rather he was poisoned on the orders of Joseph Stalin.

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