An account of one of this century's most terrifying and important figures, containing material gathered from recent visits to the USSR. Publication coincides with a three-part series for Thames Television. Stalinism is a word the world knows. It stands for a system of extraordinary inflexibility, cruelty and deceit. But it was more than that. How did it produce such a unique amalgam of despair and pride? Who was Stalin - the product of the Bolshevik Revolution which he helped to lead, or an aberrant reversion to an older Russian tradition? What was the sheer scale of his achievements and his crimes? And what is his legacy to the modern Soviet Union? To answer these questions the authors have travelled extensively in the Soviet Union, from Stalin's Georgian origins through the cradle of the Revolution in Leningrad, in the Arctic death camps, the killing fields of Minsk, the collective farms ravaged by famines in the Ukraine and the new industrial cities established east of the Urals, to the homes of survivors of Stalin's time wherever they can be found, from Moscow to Mexico. His family, his bodyguards and admirers mingle here as witnesses with the disillusioned, the critical and, poignantly, the lifelong victims of Stalin.