The Georgian seminarian turned bank robber who became the party's clerk and then its master: the man who industrialised a peasant country by force, starved part of it, shot much of its elite, and then led it to victory over Hitler.
The fork
1922–1924. As general secretary he controls the appointments while Lenin, dying, writes that he should be removed. The note is read to party leaders and set aside. Everyone who took him for a dull administrator will regret it.
What they wanted
A socialist state that can never be beaten again, with factories, tractors and an army, and a party that can never oppose him. Peasants, nations and old comrades are obstacles.
What it cost
The famine of 1932–33, the Great Terror of 1937–38, the Gulag, the deportation of whole peoples, the pact with Hitler and the shooting of Polish officers at Katyn. His defenders point to the Red Army in Berlin.
The fight
Lenin's heir or his betrayer? A paranoid tyrant or a ruthless believer? Oleg Khlevniuk, working from the archives, finds a dictator who was both at once.