The first volume of Kotkin's planned three-volume biography of Stalin has been very well received by the historical community. The general consensus in academics' reviews of the book is that Kotkin has produced a sweeping and accurate view of Stalin and his rise to power.

Sheila Fitzpatrick's review in The Guardian was emblematic of these positive reviews. Fitzpatrick, the doyen of Soviet social history, took issue with Kotkin's tendency to prioritize broad claims over direct evidence, but also concluded that he was "spot-on with his argument about the significance of the collectivisation decision." Writing in the February 2016 issue of the American Historical Review, David Brandenberger tacks to a slightly more negative appraisal of the biography than Fitzpatrick. He notes that Kotkin at time favors more sweeping generalizations and perhaps over-emphasizes Stalin's talents at the expense of his rivals. As Brandenberger notes:

This argumentation, combined with Kotkin’s tendency to exaggerate Stalin’s administrative genius (regarding the creation of the party bureaucracy [422–425], his assembly of a powerful patron-client network [431–435, 469–470], etc.), results in a biography that sometimes evokes the personality cult that the Soviet ideological establishment constructed around the general secretary during his lifetime.

These problems do not diminish Brandenberger's estimation of the three-volume biography. He notes, like Fitzpatrick, that Kotkin has synthesized a tremendous amount of secondary literature on the period and incorporated his own archival findings. The AHR review concludes that if Kotkin is more consistent, Kotkin could dethrone interpretations of Stalin that are "often incautious and hyperbolic literature."

Hiroaki Kuromiya, himself a biographer of Stalin, produced a more guarded praise of Stalin in the Journal of Cold War Studies. Kuromiya critiques a factor few other reviewers take issue with- its length- claiming "in a book half the size, Kotkin would still have been able to make the same argument without any problem." More seriously, Kuromiya notes that Kotkin arguably does not take the issue of contingency seriously. Mirroring Brandenberger obliquely, he notes that Stalin's succession to Lenin's role was not a given and that many of the preconditions that allowed Stalin's dictatorship were already present inside the nascent USSR. conversely, Lewis Siegelbaum's review in the fall 2015 issue of Slavic Review faults Kotkin for occasionally devoting too much time to contingency. Siegelbaum cites the old Russian adage "if my grandmother had a beard, she would be my grandfather," to fault Kotkin's occasional forays into counterfactual territory such as speculating if the Whites had embraced the peasant revolution, Lenin and co. would have soon been swinging from lampposts. More than Brandenberger or Fitzpatrick, Siegelbaum locates the Paradox of Power within the larger corpus of Kotkin's already impressive work. He observes that Kotkin has seemingly drifted away from the Foucauldian-inspired approach to power of Magnetic Mountain, which stressed the individual and local, to geopolitics of Kotkin's Armageddon Averted. The result is that it is less of a biography of Stalin the man, but rather biography of Stalin as an reflection of Soviet power.

This was a factor emphasized in two review articles produced for the Winter 2016 issue of Kritika. Both Michael David-Fox and Jörg Baberowski maintain that Kotkin's work is a masterful and engaging work of synthesis. Baberowski maintains that the violence of the later Stalin period was implicit within the Soviet system before Stalin's ascent to power. According to Baberowski:

Violence always remained an option. Violence is a power resource that not everyone can use with ease, but whose use is understood by everyone. Nothing is more appealing to those in power than to counter disobedience with force. It is simple and easy to allow violence to speak when real opposition is no longer a possibility. Already during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks had spread fear and terror, had forcefully taken crops and livestock. This strategy had always proven successful.

Baberowski notes that Stalin was uniquely primed to take advantage of this system, but Kotkin's voluminous documentation shows the Georgian was not unique. Likewise, David-Fox maintains that

The major contribution of Kotkin’s first volume is to expose the parallel insecurities haunting the ambitions of the revolution and its leader or, put another way, to interrelate the personal and structural trajectories of Stalin’s power and the party-state.

David-Fox does critique Kotkin's inconsistency in his squaring of the personal with the structural, but like Brandenberger, David-Fox does not believe this shortcoming fundamentally alters the value of Kotkin's biography.

As the above sample of reviews indicates, the general view of Paradoxes of Power is that is a balanced work that will become a centerpiece of Stalin studies once complete. Although geared towards an educated reader, some of Kotkin's "bombshells" are really not that much of a surprise to specialists on the early USSR. Since the fall of the USSR and the opening of archives, one of the jokes among Soviet studies is the "secret of the archives is that there were no secrets," meaning that Soviet elites talked much the same way they did in private state memoranda as they did in public propaganda. Additionally, archival work on the 1920s as well as enormous secondary literature has taken much of the wind out of the sails of the Troskyite argument that Stalin usurped the Soviet experiment after Lenin's death. There was widespread disappointment within the state over the trajectory of NEP and although it was a period of avant-garde experimentation, the unemployment and consumerism of NEPmen was something fundamentally at odds with the ideals of the Bolsheviks. Trosky may have been more intellectually-minded than Stalin, but this actually put him at a disadvantage compared to his rivals. Many veterans of the pre-1917 underground considered excessive theorization a vice that inhibited action and verbosity was often associated with Jews. Kotkin builds on the works of Stephen Wheatcroft and Fitzpatrick which contended that Stalin's rise was not so much a victory of one man, but a team of like-minded apparatchiks- Team Stalin in Wheatcroft's phrasing. Baberowski's own research into Stalinist terror as well as earlier works on Soviet terror such as Paul Hagenloh's monograph on Soviet police shows that terror had its roots in the Soviet state well before the "Grey Blur" triumphed over his rivals.

Obviously Paradoxes of Power is not the final word on Stalin. Brandenburger and Kuromiya's critiques that Kotkin likely underestimated the acumen of Stalin's rivals is a common trap of massive biographies. Biographers sometimes get to mystified by the magnetism of their subject to the detriment of their contemporaries. But Kotkin clearly did something right to get such a general consensus about the strength of his opus from a fairly diverse lot of historians.