Stalin

The definitive book on Stalin, selling in millions of copies and translated into dozens of languages. The best biography of the greatest dictator of the 20th century, written from an anti-Stalinist perspective, yet preserving historical objectivity. A son of “enemies of the people” (his father was executed and his mother died in exile), D. A. Volkogonov did not stoop to settling personal scores. He maintained professional impartiality and produced not political propaganda, but an encyclopedic, comprehensive study of the phenomenon of the Leader—not a book for a day, but one for all times.

From the “October spasms” of 1917 and the fierce struggle over Lenin’s legacy to collectivization, industrialization, and the Great Terror; from the catastrophic start of the war to the Great Victory; from the formation of the superpower to the death of the “Kremlin mountaineer” and the exposure of the “cult of personality”—this fundamental work reconstructs the true history of the grand, heroic, and bloody epoch in all its horror and greatness, giving Stalin his due and submitting his immense accomplishments and monstrous crimes to the judgment of descendants.