STALIN BIOGRAPHY LESS 'EXPLOSIVE' THAN PROMISED.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: "Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents From Russia's Secret Archives"

Author: Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by H.T. Willetts

Data: Illustrated. 607 pages, Doubleday; $30

Our rating: Three stars.

The subtitle of Edvard Radzinsky's bitterly condemnatory life of Stalin sounds too much like an advertisement: "The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents From Russia's Secret Archives." Yet its tone seems apt, consistent as it is with so much of the book's contents.

A popular Russian playwright and the author of a best-selling work of history, "The Last Czar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II," Radzinsky betrays an overly strong sense of the dramatic in this work, which is based on interviews and correspondence with survivors of the Stalin era and on the author's reading of secret archives opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, too many of the book's so-called revelations also seem like hype. Radzinsky loves to pose dramatic questions: For what dark reason did Stalin misstate his birthday by a year? When Lenin died in 1924, was it because Stalin had poisoned him? Did Stalin shoot his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, then make it look like suicide? And was he himself the victim of foul play when he finally died in 1953?

But too often after exploring such questions at some length, Radzinsky arrives at anticlimactic conclusions.

Yes, Stalin's birthday was altered from Dec. 6, 1878, to Dec. 22, 1879, but this happened only because he encouraged an assistant to cover up the facts of his youth.

No, Lenin wasn't poisoned; the cause of his death was atherosclerosis, mainly affecting the cerebral blood vessels.

Stalin didn't shoot his wife; she shot herself, just as we have believed for decades.

And while Radzinsky enterprisingly tracks down a bodyguard who was on duty the night of Stalin's death and gets him to break 40 years of silence, nothing substantial emerges to indicate a conspiracy behind Stalin's death.

Elsewhere Radzinsky's revelations are intriguing but vague. He states that the deformity of Stalin's left arm was not caused by a childhood accident, as Stalin told his second wife, but instead by an injury incurred during some terrorist operation he mounted in 1906 or 1907. But his evidence for this is no more than hearsay passed on to him by his father.

He wonders why Stalin was able to move about so freely while under surveillance as a revolutionary, and concludes that Stalin at the time was doubling as an agent for the czarist secret police. Again, his evidence is contrived and hardly "based on explosive new documents," as the book's subtitle advertises.

Throughout Radzinsky's text, similar cases abound.

In a way, this seems a shame, because in other respects his sense of drama serves him well. He divides Stalin's life into three acts: first, the early years when he was called Soso, until his expulsion from a Tiflis seminary in 1899; second, his rise as a revolutionary nicknamed Koba after the hero of his favorite book, "The Parricide," by the Georgian author Kazbegi, and third, his mature years as Stalin, communism's ruthless man of steel.

Radzinsky sees the metamorphosis from one stage to another as being caused by two profound disillusionments: first, Stalin's loss of faith in God, which left him a revolutionary Marxist, then his loss of belief in Lenin (who he thought had merely used him), which left him profoundly cynical and ridden with hatred.

Yet the less faith he had in people the more he understood how to charm and manipulate them. And how to dominate them by instilling terror.

Tantalizingly enough, Radzinsky's views accord with recent scholarship on the subject, in particular with the portrait of Stalin drawn by Robert Conquest in "Stalin: Breaker of Nations" (1991) and by Radzinsky's predecessor into Soviet archives, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, in "Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy" (1991).

Like them, Radzinsky stresses Stalin's early closeness to Lenin, his uncanny shrewdness as a judge of people and his full awareness of all the cruelty perpetrated under his dread command.

At the same time, Radzinsky's narrative is deeply personal. Driven by anger almost as bitter as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's in "The Gulag Archipelago" and peppered with pungent anecdotes, it sweeps the reader along with its force.

And many of his documentary details are worthwhile. The question answered by a series of prison letters to Stalin from Nikolai Bukharin, the old Bolshevik convicted in the 1938 show trials, may not exactly amount to "the enigma of the century," as Radzinsky exaggeratedly characterizes the mystery of how the purge-trial victims justified their treatment.

Yet to see Bukharin avow his love for Stalin, beg to be poisoned instead of shot and declare that there must be "some great and bold political idea behind the general purge" is certainly psychologically revealing.

Still, Radzinsky draws certain large conclusions from the evidence he has gleaned.

He insists, for instance, that an anti-Semitic campaign introduced by Stalin shortly before his death was not only intended to bring on a second Holocaust, but was also meant to "create a wave of revulsion against the U.S.S.R. in the West, and above all in the United States," that in turn would precipitate war with the West, or as the author puts it, "the last war, which would finally destroy capitalism."

Yet in offering his evidence for this conclusion, he begins by admitting that "there could be no relevant documents." He goes on to cite "the oral testimony of contemporaries." He next repeats some items of secondhand gossip. And he finally concludes, "All these stories must obviously have some basis in reality."

Once again, as so often happens in this overwrought account, the details make the reader wonder if there may be less here than meets the eye.

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Photo Unfortunately, too many of the so-called revelations in the latest biography of Joseph Stalin seem like hype.