The most authoritative and engrossing biography of the notorious dictator ever written, winner of the 2016 PROSE Award for Biography & Autobiography"Enthralling, brilliant, and groundbreaking, this book confirms Khlevniuk as probably the greatest living expert on Stalin.Essential reading."—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar 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 numerou