Josef Stalin exercised supreme power in the Soviet Union from 1929  until his death in 1953. During that quarter century, by Oleg  Khlevniuk's estimate, he caused the imprisonment and execution of no  fewer than a million Soviet citizens per year. Millions more were  victims of famine directly resulting from Stalin's policies. What drove  him toward such ruthlessness?

This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the  vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained  portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin  as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous  controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while  assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports,  and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that  altered the course of world history.

In brief, revealing prologues to each chapter, Khlevniuk takes his reader into Stalin's favorite dacha, where the innermost circle of Soviet leadership gathered as their vozhd lay dying. Chronological chapters then illuminate major themes:  Stalin's childhood, his involvement in the Revolution and the early  Bolshevik government under Lenin, his assumption of undivided power and  mandate for industrialization and collectivization, the Terror, World  War II, and the postwar period. At the book's conclusion, the author  presents a cogent warning against nostalgia for the Stalinist era.