Dmitri Volkogonov

A biography of Stalin. The files of the Communist Party, the military and the secret police, as well as Stalin's personal files, were opened to the author alone for this book. The documents are shown to reveal why Stalin emerged as Lenin's successor, and why he terrorized an entire population.

'Absorbing... I now place Volkogonov's great biographical triptych [Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky] at the top of my reading list on the Russian revolution.'Niall Ferguson, Sunday Times Following Stalin (1991) and Lenin (1994), Dmitri Vokogonov completes his ...

The special assistant to Boris Yeltsin radically alters the traditional image of Lenin with a biography based on secret Soviet archives, revealing the Founding Father as a cruel, totalitarian leader who was responsible for the worst excesses of the Soviet state.