About this book

In this detailed, crisply written, highly readable volume, Ronald Hingley —one of the Western world’s leading experts on Soviet Russia — deals fully with Stalin’s Life and Legend for the first time. He sets them in the context of what really happened, using sources independent of Stalin, and quarrying recently discovered material. He also examines the backlash of the anti-Stalinist counter-legend, originally prompted by Trotsky, and developed since the dictator’s death by Khrushchev and Western-published Trotskyite biographers.