The life story of the revolutionary who became leader of Communist Russia.

The murderous search for Josef Stalin's personal notebook takes an American professor to the vast forests of northern Russia, where Stalin's final, shocking secret waits to be discovered.

"A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world. It has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler's son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler...

"In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world's largest peasant economy into "socialist modernity, " otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost. What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over...

November 1943: World War II teetered in the balance. The Nazis controlled nearly all of the European continent. Japan dominated the Pacific. Allied successes at Sicily and Guadalcanal had gained modest ground but at an extraordinary cost. On the Eastern Front, the Soviets had already lost millions of lives. That same month in Tehran, with the fate of the world in question, the 'Big Three,' Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin,...

April, 1945. East of Berlin, the Red Army stands poised to unleash its final assault upon the ruined capital of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich. To the north, at a lonely outpost near the Baltic sea, German scientists perfect a guidance system for the mighty V2 rocket, which has already caused massive damage to the cities of London and Antwerp. This device, known only by the codename Diamondstream, will allow the rocket to arrive at its target with pin-point...

"Drawing on ambitious new research in European and U.S. archives, Stalin's War revolutionizes our understanding of World War II by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war that emerged in Europe in August 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, was the Pacific war of 1941-1945 the direct result of Stalin's maneuverings, which he orchestrated to unleash...