For ten years General Dmitri Volkogonov studied military records, party archives, trial documents, and other long-suppressed evidence from the era of the purges- one of the most painful and turbulent periods in Russian history. This is the definitive account of the man, the time, and the tragedy. The author had an incredible access to secret KGB files in his role as historian for the Soviet Army, and he pieces together the story of the man who for thirty years controlled the minds and bodies of the hundreds and millions of people of the Soviet Union. This book, the first of a trilogy written by Volkogonov on Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky, takes advantage of the author's discoveries to reveal much heretofore unknown knowledge about Stalin's reign of terror in the early days of the Soviet Union.