The first time Volodya saw a photograph of Stalin was in the Russian Embassy building on the compound in Peking where he spent much of his early childhood. Almost all photographs of Stalin portrayed him in a khaki or white army-style jacket. Sometimes he was shown holding a smiling little girl. Volodya knew, of course, that Stalin was the leader of Russia, but he was five or six at the time and has no memory of how he reacted to his first look at the leader’s face.

During his early school years in Moscow, Volodya read regularly the newspaper for youth, Pionerskaya Pravda, with its stories about Young Pioneers who helped catch spies, aided the old and sick, took part in harvesting. Many photographs of Stalin appeared in the pages of the paper, especially on occasions that marked Soviet or Communist Party anniversaries. The face in the photographs was never truly that of the leader, whose features were marked with smallpox scars always skillfully touched up by the photographers. And never actually shown was his withered left arm, the result of blood poisoning from a serious childhood injury. He had come from a life of terrible poverty in eastern Georgia. His father was a cobbler and a violent drunk, who often beat his wife and son; his mother was a peasant. In his youth he attended a seminary where he encountered, among the students, Georgian nationalism and a hatred of tsarist authority. An assiduous reader with a good memory, he was introduced by fellow students to the writings of Darwin and Lenin, as well as to the work of Plekhanov, who had insinuated the thought of Karl Marx into Russia. Stalin left the seminary in 1899 at the age of twenty and entered the ranks of professional revolutionaries. Into his blood and bones had penetrated a bitterness at the oppressions of the tsar, the capitalist, the landlord. He organized strikes and demonstrations, planned a number of bank robberies to help finance the Revolution, and wrote articles in which he agreed with Lenin’s view that among the party’s tasks was the need to “arm the people locally… to organize workshops for the manufacture of different kinds of explosives, to draw up plans for seizing state and private stores of arms and arsenals.” The articles brought him to the attention of Lenin, who had urged the use of plundered funds in the waging of the Revolution. Eight times arrested and seven times exiled, Stalin managed to escape from each exile except the last-from which he was released soon after the abdication of Nicholas II. Together with Trotsky, he stood at Lenin’s side during the early years of the Revolution, then outmaneuvered Trotsky in the struggle for leadership of the party after Lenin died in 1924. He was now ruler of a tumultuous and suffering Russia, which he was attempting to subdue to his own vision of communism and a centralized party.

Much of that vision involved crushing all opposition to his plans for collectivization, industrialization, and total control of the party. In this he followed closely the path set by Lenin-with a singular exception. No matter how bitter the quarrels within the inner circle, Lenin had never turned against those inside the party, especially his old comrades, the Bolsheviks who had created the Revolution. But Stalin saw in those very Bolsheviks-Ryutin, Radek, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and others -his most dangerous enemies, who had often aligned themselves against him in heated inner party debates. From 1930 to 1933 three attempts by high party officials to remove him failed. Most in the inner circle saw him as the only one who could lead the country and preferred the possibility of despotism under his rule to the probability of anarchy and the collapse of the Revolution were he to be ousted from power. Stalin failed in his effort to have Ryutin, who had instigated the second and third attempts to remove him, sentenced to death for political offenses. The Politburo hesitated, resisted, shied away from the arrests and executions of loyal party members. Sergei Kirov, a popular party leader, an excellent speaker, and the boss of the Leningrad party, argued strongly against the death penalty for Ryutin and persuaded others in the Politburo to oppose Stalin. Only Kaganovich sided with Stalin.

That reluctance dissolved with the December 1, 1934, murder of Kirov-a deed, it is now believed, Stalin himself arranged through the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. The assassination of Kirov at the hands of a lone gunman in the offices of the Leningrad Soviet provided Stalin with all the weapons he needed against his actual and perceived enemies in the party. When news of the assassination reached the Kremlin, Stalin, together with Molotov and Yagoda, took the overnight train from Moscow to Leningrad. A blizzard of edicts and arrest orders issued forth from Stalin, with the swift and automatic approval of the Politburo-among them, an immediate death penalty for terrorists, with no possibility of pardon.

There took place in the wake of the Kirov assassination a paroxysm of shootings, as well as deportations to Siberia and the Arctic: from Leningrad alone, between thirty and forty thousand men and women in only a few months. The assassin, Nikolayev, a misfit who had been unable to find a job and bore a deep personal grudge against Kirov and the Leningrad party, was tried and executed. Also arrested were former leaders of the Leningrad party, among them Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin’s opponents. The two Old Bolsheviks, makers of the Revolution and leaders of the party, were sent to prison.

In March 1935, death with no possibility of pardon became the penalty for espionage or for flight abroad. All the members of a family were now to be held responsible for the crime of any one of them; even those who had been entirely unaware of a crime could be sent into exile. And in April 1935 children from the age of twelve were made subject to the death penalty.

Kamenev and Zinoviev were brought back from prison in 1936 to stand trial, and were then shot. In 1938, it was the turn of Bukharin, Rykov, Radek, and eighteen others-of the sixteen condemned to death, twelve were Jews. Among those shot in 1938 was the NKVD head, Yagoda, who had suddenly been arrested in 1936 and replaced by Nicholas Yezhov, one of the most repellent officials in all of Russian history, who was himself removed from his post in 1938 and replaced by Lavrenti Beria. From 1937 to 1940 there took place the trials and executions of eight commanders of the armed forces. One was Marshal Michael Tukhachevsky, who had denounced Stalin for a tactical blunder in 1920 that had cost the Bolsheviks the chance of victory in the war against Poland; Stalin seemed never to forget his detractors, bore his grudges against them forever. And on the very eve of the Second World War came the NKVD shootings of about forty thousand officers accused of plotting against Stalin.

Like a ponderous black glacier, the terror moved across the Soviet landscape, through cities and countryside, through every organization and branch of the party and government; the heads of industries, leaders in the republics, scientists and engineers, writers like Maxim Gorky and Isaac Babel among numerous others, poets like Osip Mandelstam, to the families of the accused, their distant relatives, friends, associates. Millions were arrested. Most of those who ended up in the labor camps were utterly confounded by the evil destiny that had shattered their lives; many believed that Stalin was unaware of what was going on, that it was all the doing of the sinister officials who ran the NKVD. For Stalin had cleverly distanced himself from the terror. He moved his offices from the building of the Central Committee on Staraya Square to new quarters behind the walls of the Kremlin; he ceased delivering major speeches; from 1937 to 1939 he did not appear in public save on rare occasions. Few were aware of his regular meetings with Yezhov, and that the terror was of his making.