Robert Service is widely acknowledged as one of our finest contemporary historians of Russia. In this devastating biography of Joseph Stalin, he provides the first full-scale study for more than twenty years of "one of the most notorious figures in history". Drawing on hitherto unpublished material from the Moscow archives, only recently opened up to Western scholars, and on personal testimonies and private papers gathered from all over Russia, Georgia and Abkhazia, Service challenges the conventional view of the Soviet leader as simply a murderous bureaucrat. When he rose to supreme power in 1928 Stalin was fifty. Service describes in unprecedented detail the formative influences that created the "Man of Steel": his early childhood in Georgia as the son of a violent drunkard and a devout woman; his enrolment in a religious seminary; and his days as a young revolutionary and dedicated Marxist, whose zeal saw him an established and able member of the Bolshevik Party...