About the Author

Dmitri Volkogonov was a Colonel-General in the Soviet Army’s propaganda department until his views came to be regarded as ‘un-Soviet’. The biographer of Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky, he became Defence Adviser to President Yeltsin. He died in December 1995, shortly after completing this book.

Harold Shukman, who also translated Volkogonov’s Stalin and Lenin, is a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.