Books: Servant into Master

STALIN: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (600 pp.)—Isaac Deufscher—Oxford ($5).

In 1915, Joseph Stalin, professional revolutionist, was exiled to Kureika, Siberia. At 35, he had given all of his adult years to underground Bolshevik work, and it seemed they had been spent in vain. To Olga Alliluyeva, his future mother-in-law, he wrote a letter thanking her for food parcels and asking only for a few picture postcards: "In this accursed country [of frozen tundras] I have been overcome by a silly longing to see some landscape, be it only on paper."

This is Stalin's only available private letter, one of the few...

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