A man takes a razor to Joseph Stalin’s neck in a new book from Paul Levitt, professor of English at the University of Colorado. The intention isn’t to kill the Soviet dictator. At least not at first. It’s to give him a shave. “Stalin’s Barber” is the story of Razan Shtube, a Jewish Albanian barber who's hired by the Kremlin. The book is a work fiction, but painstakingly researched and grounded in the history of the paranoid and heavy-handed Soviet regime.
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