a short biography of Josef Stalin by Zuni

[Zuni]

The new Secretary General of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, rose at the podium to address the delegates to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. What he said sent shockwaves around the world. He denounced his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, the man who had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for nearly 30 years. He endured cries of righteous indignation from Party members who still worshiped Stalin as a hero. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s policies of terror, the cult of personality he created, and even denounced Stalin for trusting Hitler and being ill prepared for the Nazi invasion of 1941. He pointed out that Stalin never visited the front during the war, and ridiculed the belief that Stalin saved the Soviet Union. By the end of the speech, many delegates applauded and cheered Khrushchev. Khrushchev had little to fear. He was the head of the Communist Party, the highest position in the Soviet Union, a tradition started by Stalin. But Khrushchev would never have dared to even make jokes about the fallen leader during his lifetime. Only three years before, however, a speech even mildly critical of Stalin would have meant certain death.
Khrushchev made this speech in secret, persuaded by old henchmen of Stalin like Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich not to “wash their dirty linen in public.” These men had much to hide. They had a lot of blood on their hands, and quite frankly, so did Khrushchev. They had all helped Stalin carry out his dirty deeds for decades. But the fact that Khrushchev made the speech was still remarkable. It did not stay secret for long. Parts of their speech found their way into newspapers all over the world.
The truth about Stalin was not something that many in the Soviet government did not want out. In 1964, after ousting Khrushchev, old line Stalinist Leonid Brezhnev decided that Stalin would receive the silent treatment in Soviet texts and speeches. His name was omitted from many publications, and often his role was downplayed, as were his crimes. It was not until Mikhail Gorbachev allowed measures of political freedom did the full truth become known to the Soviet Union. In 1990 Gorbachev admitted and apologized for the 1940 massacre of 15,000 Polish Officers, ordered by Stalin, and blamed on the Nazis for 50 years in Soviet Propaganda. More and more information concerning the nature and extent of Stalin’s crimes became available. The truth about Stalin along with the gulf it represented between the governing authority and the people, in many ways, led to the downfall of the Soviet Empire.

Josef Stalin was born in Gori, in Georgia, on December 21, 1879. His true name was Iosif Vissarionvich Dzhugashvili, the only surviving son of Vissarion and Yekaterina Dzhugashvili. His parents were former serfs who had been emancipated in their youth. Stalin later showed little of his Georgian peasant roots other than his accent, developing a distinctly Russian temperament and viewpoint. He referred to Georgia as “a little piece of Soviet territory.” His daughter, Svetlana, would comment that he was “completely Russified,” and his son joked that “Papa used to be a Georgian once!”
Stalin had a troubled childhood. Vissarion would drink and beat him often, a not uncommon occurrence in poor peasant families. His father eventually went to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital and worked as a cobbler. He lost touch with his family and apparently was killed in a knife fight. Stalin suffered much from diseases and physical abnormalities. He almost died from smallpox as a boy, and it stunted his growth. Stalin was only five foot four inches tall as an adult. He also almost died from blood poisoning, as well as having his left arm crippled, which never fully recovered, in a carriage accident. Apparently several of his toes on the left foot were joined together.
Stalin received primary education in a Christian academy, the Gori Church School. After that he entered the Tiflis Theological Seminary. He began reading banned literature there, and was exposed to harsh Russification policies that were being implemented across Georgia by the Tsar’s decree. Josef showed signs of rebelliousness, as well as imperiousness at the seminary. The adolescent Stalin read a book called The Patricide in which a hero, Koba, leads an army to fight the Tsar and is betrayed. It became his favorite, and he adopted the nickname Koba, which would be used by those that were close to him for the rest of his life.
The young Stalin eventually rejected Seminary life and left to become a revolutionary and a bandit in 1899. He became a prominent Georgian Marxist leader and joined the Social Democratic Party. The Tiflis Party Organization expelled him after he became too dictatorial. He then went to join up with other socialists in the Georgian seaport of Batum. Here he worked as a provocateur and his actions led to a disastrous rally in which at least 15 marchers were killed when Tsarist police fired on them.
Stalin was later arrested and exiled to Siberia. For the first of many times he simply left the weakly enforced exile and returned to his revolutionary activities. By 1903 the Social Democrats had split into two parties, the followers of Lenin were called the Bolsheviks (meaning Majority) and the followers of Martov were called Mensheviks (meaning minority). The main difference is that Lenin wanted a party of professional revolutionaries, while Martov wanted to open the doors to any proletarian. Lenin did not insist on being working class either. As long as someone was willing to devote their lives to revolution, it was good enough for him. Secondly, the Mensheviks also did not believe in a putsch, or armed seizure of power by a vanguard, but a broad based popular uprising.
Stalin, who now considered himself a professional revolutionary, sided with Lenin’s faction. Stalin, with his religious education, was very comfortable with the highly sectarian and dogmatic frame of mind of many of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin. People who did not tow the party line exactly were labeled as heretics or even traitors. Lenin could not stand dissent.
Stalin spent the next years of his life working as a bank robber for the party, in jail, in exile in Siberia or raising party cadres. He devoted his life to his new calling and never wavered in his faith for the Bolshevik dogma. In 1904 he was married for a short time and had a son named Yakov. In 1912 he was selected by Lenin to be a representative on the Bolshevik Party Central Committee. He also took the name Stalin now as his official title, being known mostly as Koba to other revolutionaries. But Stalin was fated to spend more time in jail and more time in exile. This period would end in 1917, with the Tsar’s abdication in March 1917 and the setting up of a pro-democratic Provisional Government in Petrograd (AKA St. Petersburg, AKA Leningrad).
After the first revolution, a combination between bread riots and protest at the First World War, a system had been set up where there were two major legislative bodies, the Russian Duma and the new revolutionary Soviet shared power. The Tsar was no longer in power, and a new Provisional authority was ready to step in. After Stalin arrived in Petrograd with Bolshevik Lev Kamenev, he wrote articles for communist newspapers supporting the Provisional Government. Then he found out that was the opposite of the Bolshevik line. So he began to write anti-Provisional government propaganda. The main line was that the Provisional Government supported continuing a defensive war against the Germans, who were advancing into Russian territory. Most of the Duma and the Soviet supported this (the Soviet was dominated by the Menshevik and the Socialist Revolutionary Parties), but many of the soldiers of the line were ready to mutiny, and many peasants just wanted ‘Peace, Land and Bread.’
The Bolsheviks aligned themselves with mutinous soldiers and waited for their moment to strike. In November 1917, they stormed the capital and took over the Government by force. The Second Revolution had begun.

The whole story of the Russian Revolution, Civil War, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the war with Poland, the famines and the end of the First World War is far too complex and lengthy to discuss here. Stalin played a role as a military commander and bureaucrat in this trying time (he was known for ruthlessness). The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, managed to survive and spread their power to the farthest corners of the Russian Empire, but lost Poland and the Baltic States as well as Finland.

After the war, Stalin was made General Secretary of the Communist Party. Lenin had suffered a stroke and was not able to lead the Party full time. He had to delegate responsibility to his deputies. Stalin used this opportunity to raise his standing in the party, and began to use what was considered a powerless position as General Secretary to overcome his enemies in a ruthless power struggle.
Lenin began to realize that Stalin was not a good front man for the Communist Party. He was Machiavellian and impolite. Lenin began to favor Leon Trotsky, a leading Bolshevik intellectual and commander of the Bolshevik military forces during the Civil War. Trotsky and Stalin despised each other. Stalin began plotting with two prominent Bolsheviks, Lev Kamanev and Grigori Zinoviev to minimize Trotsky’s influence in the Party.
On January 21, 1924 Lenin died. He had lost his ability to speak and to write in the last year of his life, but not before he had dictated his last testament. This was brought out and read before the Communist Central Committee. In it he denounced Stalin for being ‘rude’ and suggested that the committee choose another General Secretary for the Communist Party. But Stalin had already shored up his political base and managed to have Lenin’s testament suppressed.
Now Stalin dominated the Party apparatus and with the help of Zinoviev and Kamanev as well as another prominent Communist, Nikolai Bukharin., he was slowly becoming the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. He also had his own followers, men like Lazar Kaganovich, Andrei Zhdanov, Vyachaslev Molotov, Andrei Vyshinsky and Kliment Voroshilov. Kaganovich, in particular, was almost a caricature of Stalinist ruthlessness, a real monster. Vyshinsky too was quite a verminous specimen. He could count on the support of others, like Feliks Dzerhinsky, the much feared head of the secret police, the GPU, formerly known as the Cheka during the Civil War.
The first target of Stalin’s attempts to destroy his enemies was Trotsky, who was one of the most intelligent as well as most ruthless of the high ranking leaders. Trotsky had quite a few enemies. Zinoviev and Kamanev, also fiercely anti-Trotsky, called for a vote to have Trotsky removed from the Politburo. Stalin, in what was calculated to seem like a merciful move, asked for Trotsky to be removed as Commissar for War. Stalin later had his old ally, Kliment Voroshilov, installed in this position. In 1927 Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union. Later, he regretted not having him killed Trotsky. In 1940 one of Stalin’s agents caught Trotsky in Mexico and killed him with an ice pick.
Back in Moscow, Stalin was now allying with Bukharin and Rykov, the so called ‘Right Bloc’ against the Zinoviev /Kamanev ‘Left Bloc.’ The left bloc favored an aggressive strategy to combat ‘errant’ classes and wanted to essentially starve the peasants to feed the workers. It was essentially an attempt to recreate early Leninist policy favored by the now doomed Trotsky, and was similar to what Stalin would later do on a massive scale in the 1930s. After he had Zinoviev and Kamanev expelled from the party, he turned on his erstwhile allies, Bukharin and the other ‘rightists’.
By the end of the 1920s, Stalin was the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. He had managed to eliminate all his rivals for power. Now he turned his sights onto grandiose schemes for the country at large. He would institute full scale collectivization of agriculture, a massive campaign of industrialization to increase Soviet manufacturing to compete with the west and finally would unleash a class warfare terror campaign on a scale never before seen.

In the first stage of collectivization, the government began seizing all the property of peasants and forcing them to work on hastily built collective farms. The peasant was not allowed to do what he wanted with the grain he produced, and almost all of it was taken by the state. The seeds of a major famine were being sown. All over the Soviet countryside, peasants began to protest and then would burn grain and slaughter animals to prevent them being ‘stolen’ by the government. Many peasants who refused to join collective farms found all their property taken away and then were frequently killed or hauled off to the huge system of labor camps that were being erected all over Siberia. Millions starved to death, many more lost everything they owned. More than thirty million people were directly affected by the famines. Outbreaks of cannibalism were reported all over the Ukraine.
Stalin also decided to deal with the Kulaks, which were the Soviet term for rich peasants. The term itself is a misnomer, it was a savage attempt by Lenin to create class conflict in rural areas by demonizing the more successful peasants. In his own day, Lenin purged millions of peasants as being class enemies, but little evidence exists to support the accusations. Stalin seized on this opportunity to wage war on these ‘class enemies’. He had millions of so called ‘Kulaks’ deported to the GULAG, which was an acronym for the huge system of ‘corrective labor camps’ that existed all over the USSR. Hundreds of thousands more were shot outright.
By now Stalin had caused millions of deaths. But he was just getting started. He developed his plans for industrialization of the Soviet Union. Massive public works projects, often created with slave labor from the Gulag, were set up across the country. These dams, canals, factories and railroads took an unbelievable human toll to create, far worse than what Peter the Great caused when he decided to build St. Petersburg. The Moscow-Volga Canal alone cost as many as 500,000 human lives to create. As this was going on, Stalin was preparing to purge the Soviet Union of all possible enemies.
In 1934 the leader of the Leningrad Communist Party, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated, most likely on Stalin’s orders. Kirov had been a popular man, and many viewed him as the only hope of replacing Stalin. Stalin now enlarged the powers of the NKVD, the new name for the secret police, and ordered it’s head, Genrikh Yagoda, to begin the purge.
In 1935 Stalin decreed that children as young as 12 could be eligible for execution. He did this mainly to get Kamanev and Zinoviev, both fathers, to confess to false crimes, so he could execute them. Stalin was now preparing lists and creating false plots to implicate other Soviet leaders in the death of Kirov. He decided that he would have these men tortured until they would confess to anything in public. Then he would put on a staged show trial to demonstrate the guilt of the accused. Often the NKVD would hold members of their families in prison to make sure they did not attempt to embarrass Stalin in public. Kamanev, Zinoviev and others were tried and executed in 1936. Stalin also replaced Yagoda as chief of the NKVD, claiming he wasn’t finding enough enemies, and installed an even more ruthless killer named Nikolai Yezhov in his place. Yagoda eventually found himself on trial, another victim of the purge. Yezhov would end up as a purge victim too. The resulting ‘Great Purge’ would be remembered in Russia as the Yezhovschina.
All over The Soviet Union, the purges were being carried out. Wave after wave of hysterical denunciations led to millions of imprisonments and executions on utterly groundless charges. The military was ruthlessly purged. Most of the officers were shot. NKVD departments in major cities were given quotas on how many people to arrest and detain. Many detainees suffered torture, humiliation and often were forced to confess to non existent crimes. Stalin urged public vigilance to combat the forces that ‘seek to destroy Socialism.’ Anyone could be the next accused. The true numbers of victims of the ‘Great Purge’ might never be known, but the number has been estimated by more than one source as at least 7,000,000. Terror reigned supreme across the land.
The show trials continued. Many prominent Soviets were hauled into a courtroom and forced to publicly confess to being a conspirator in a bizarre series of plots, often involving seeking to destroy the Soviet Union, working for the capitalists, or being a fascist agent. Kirov’s murder still was a central theme, but the ‘conspiracy’ around it had grown into such a medusa that it threatened to devour the whole society. Nikolai Bukharin was hauled in front of the Judge, Andrei Vyshinsky, who openly ridiculed and tormented him. Bukharin was executed on March 15, 1938. He was only one of many old Bolsheviks arrested and killed. Virtually none of the old Guard remained. Yezhov too was then purged and replaced by a yet even more disgusting figure, Lavrenti Beria.

In 1939 Stalin embarked on a dangerous foreign policy gamble. He knew he was not ready to oppose the new military power to the west, Nazi Germany. Attempts to create an Anti-fascist coalition with the UK and France were going nowhere. Feelers were sent to the Nazis, who accepted them with open arms. Hitler was trying to seize territory in Poland and knew that he could not fight on two fronts. Now, he realized that by making peace with Stalin, he would be free to conquer Poland. By August the two sides were at the negotiating table.
The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed in August 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop as Stalin watched from the background. Not released were the details of the secret protocols, which divided Eastern Europe between the two predatory monsters. One week later, on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. On September 17, Soviet troops moved into Poland from the east, preventing any hope of Poland resisting any longer. Stalin cynically told the world this was a defensive measure.
Stalin’s appetite for foreign conquests did not end with the eastern half of Poland. In November his armies marched into Finland, where they were repeatedly repulsed by the hardy, well trained Finnish forces. Because of Stalin’s extensive purging of the military, second and third string officers commanded most of the troops and their incompetence showed. More Soviets were killed than Finland could field in it’s entire army. It took until February for the Soviet forces to get their act together and overpower the small number of Finns opposing them. Germany watched this debacle with interest. Hitler became overconfident and began to think he might be able to destroy the Soviet military rather easily.
In 1939 and 1940 Stalin moved on to the former Russian territories of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. One by one he had his military occupy the Baltic countries and eventually annexed them. Hitler finally decided that he would attack the Soviet Union during the next Spring, in 1941. Stalin, despite speeches and writings by Hitler declaring destroying Russia and annexing huge tracts of land for his ‘1000 Year Reich’, believed that he could trust Hitler. He kept sending Hitler war supplies despite the growing evidence of the Nazi military build up in Eastern Europe. He ignored attempts by the UK, the US and others to warn that Hitler planned a massive invasion. He ordered that commanders should not do anything to prepare, so they would not provoke Germany.
The result was the largest invasion in the history of warfare. The Soviet Union was wholly unprepared, and German forces ripped through Soviet lines. German forces reached the gates of Moscow. After 4 years and 27 million dead, the Soviet Union triumphed and captured Berlin. On May 7-8, 1945 Germany surrendered to the western allies and to the Soviet Union. The events of the Second World War are too massive and complex to be related here, and in any event Stalin had little to do with the victory.

But as the war was ending, Stalin had other plans. Europe was now occupied in the east by his forces and in the west by American and British troops. He had no intention of remaining allies with the British and Americans, who he did not trust one bit. He felt that they and other groups would eventually try to destroy both the Soviet Union and him. Stalin also had no intention of removing his armies from the European nations that they had crossed to get to Germany, some of them former Axis allies who had been involved with Germany. Those states were to be a gigantic buffer zone between his enemies and the USSR. The Iron Curtain began to descend across Europe, setting the stage for 50 years of high tension.
In both divided Europe and in Korea he had turned the occupied territories into satellites. Stalinist governments were selected and installed. Soviet security forces managed their internal security. Soviet weapons were distributed to their armies. Huge population transfers, sometimes causing millions of deaths, were carried out in occupied territories and inside the USSR as well. This new Communist bloc also became very hostile to the western nations, and through agents attempted to create discord among them. Attempts were made for Communist takeovers in Italy and Greece, among others. The US President, Harry Truman, realizing what Stalin was up to, began a policy of containing Communism and aiding forces fighting Communist insurgencies. The stage was set for the 50 year ‘Cold War’ between the two ‘superpowers’ that were left after the carnage of WWII.
The Americans had one thing Stalin did not have, the Atomic Bomb. Through espionage, the use of former Nazi scientists and information, and a bomb project of their own, the Soviet Union was able to produce their first atomic weapon in 1949. Now Stalin had the most destructive weapon in the world at his disposal, and could match the Americans in every way militarily. He decided that the time was right to start trouble.
In North Korea, the Stalinist government of Kim Il Sung wanted to reunite their whole country under Communist rule. Kim had a large army, with large quantities of Soviet arms and a tough cadre of troops that had fought with both the Chinese Communists and the Soviets. The parts of Korea below the 38th parallel had been occupied by the US after the war and was now an independent country, The Republic of Korea, administered by the UN and recognized by that body. When Kim Il Sung came to Stalin and asked for permission to invade his neighbor Stalin gave him the green light, but also told him that the USSR would not intervene to protect him if he got in to trouble. He told Kim to ask the new leader of Communist China, Mao Tse Tung, for military assistance in the case of an emergency. When Mao agreed, the stage was set for the Korean war.
In 1948, one of Stalin’s associates named Andrei Zhdanov died in the hospital. There was much talk about him not receiving proper treatment from his doctors. For a while Stalin payed little attention to the controversy. By the early 1950s, Stalin, who was becoming more and more paranoid, began to believe a ‘Jewish-Nationalist conspiracy’ was threatening the Soviet Union. Jewish Doctors, it was said, were killing their patients. By now, the general tone of anti-Semitism in the USSR, kept quiet for years, became loud and obvious. Stalin began planning for a purge of Jews, and had plans drawn up to evict them from the major cities.
The purge of Jews began, and the propaganda were laid out. But then Stalin had a stroke and died on March 5, 1953. Soon after his death the authorities dropped the whole ‘Jewish-Doctor’ plot nonsense and many innocent people were exonerated.

For thirty years in Russia, death had a name: Stalin. No man in history has ever waged campaigns of such ferocious cruelty upon his own country. The death toll as a result of Stalin’s crimes is not fully known today, but is measured in the tens of millions. But Stalin had also turned the Soviet Union from a backward, agrarian nation into an industrial superpower. This alone enabled them to fight the German’s massive war machine in WWII. This made the world demand their respect. But the human cost in mortality and suffering brought one by one man’s ego and power is literally beyond comprehension.
Stalin was one of the single most important figures of the 20th Century. He was the undisputed ruler of over 1/6 of the globe, and the leader of the international communist movement. He turned the Soviet Union into an industrial and military superpower, much faster than would have happened otherwise. During his leadership, Russia won the largest war ever fought, the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He was the architect of the Cold War, setting the stage for the superpower conflict that would reshape global politics. He was the murderer of tens of millions, a cold hearted, ruthless killer who raped and savaged every population he controlled. His methods of leadership are studied by despots the world over, by people like Saddam Hussein and other leaders who rule by terror, among others. Whatever history’s final verdict on Josef Stalin, his place in world history is secure.

[La_Serpiente]

1. WHOA

THANKS FOR THE INFO!!!! :-)

[Zuni]

2. you are welcome

I had insomnia last night and decided to write a bio of Stalin. I happened to have been reading some Soviet history, and felt like it might be a challenge.

[BayCityProgressive]

3. Reading Bios

of world governments always disgusts me lol. Stalin was horrible. I think most communists and even leaders in the party probably opposed him, but who the hell would want to risk speaking against him? I am disgusted by the USA's past as well. Slavery, civil war, segregation, CIA, death penalty, lynchings, imperialism and coups all over the world responsible for killing millions, the list goes on. People need to wake up and take control of their governments or things like this will never stop.

[Zuni]

4. Stalin had plenty of help

and he only took the policies of Lenin and Trotsky to an extreme level. In their day they killed millions too.
The Communists could be very, very brutal. It wasn't just the leadership. At all levels abuses occured.In many ways this shows the fallacy of many Communist arguments that once the Proletarians are in control, abuses stop. People are people, and many are petty and greedy even in socialist conditions. Many of them were extreme dogmatics, almost like religious fanatics. The same kind of hysteria and brutality has been repeated in most Communist countries (especially China, during the 'Cultural Revolution') but with different circumstances and results.

[dolgoruky]

5. Millions?

"He (Stalin)only took the policies of Lenin and Trotsky to an extreme level. In their day they killed millions too."

Where did you get this stuff about Lenin and Trotsky killing millions?

Have you been reading Richard Pipes or Orlando Figes?

[Tredge]

7. I concur...

I read about the murders by Lenin during two Russian History classes - it was in both textbooks, and also explained at some length by both professors who were native Russians. In addition to the royal family there was the Revolution itself, involving the murders of Royalist sympathizers (Whites), and afterwards the pogroms against the Mensheviks.

I wouldn't say this stands as full proof in discussion, so I'll try and dig up one of the textbooks or other sources and add some actual quotes. The autobiography of Khrushchev should also have some information, if I remember right.

On edit: I don't believe Lenin's list of casualties ever got into the millions, but I'm not really certain either way. Neither an excuse nor an apology...

[Zuni]

9. My family were native Russians

Don't bother with Khrushchev's biography. It is self serving crap. He was a major player in the Ukraine during some of the most savage killing of the Stalin years. He sticks to Party dogma as well.

Very few of the whites could be described as true royalists. Disparate elements made up many different factions of whites including royalists, Constitutional Democrats (kadets), Socialist Revolutionaries, non-Bolshevik socialists who feared for their lives, Cossacks, Ukrainian nationalists, and vast numbers of Peasants who rebelled against both the suppression of the Church and the brutal land seizures.

[Zuni]

8. I have read Conquest, Figes, Volkogonov, Remnick, Pipes, Tucker

and many others.It is impossible to dispute the fact that Lenin used mass terror on an enormous scale. He and Trotsky built the first concentration camps in Europe. There is much primary evidence to show that Lenin had more people executed in one month than had been executed in the last 90 years of Tsardom. And that is the tip of the iceberg. He committed genocide on the peasantry both during the war and after, often sent orders like 'shoot more priests and professors', led the red terror, brutally suppressed the peasants, anarchists, post-revolution worker's strikes, the 'kulaks', the church, cossacks, independence movements in many of the nominally independent minority republics, and non-bolshevik socialists. He also helped pave the way for the USSR's first famines, which were only lessened by the NEP and ironically, aid from the United States.

Lenin and Trotsky were major butchers, and it is backed up by almost all the scholarly works on the subject. If you want to delude yourself by reading Leninist and Leninist sympathizing accounts, that is fine.

[dolgoruky]

6. What books on the Soviet Union have you been reading, Zuni?

[Zuni]

10. lets see---my sources

to write this I used Stalin, The Breaker of Nations and The Great Terror by Robert conquest, Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick, The Most Evil Men and Women in History by Miranda Twiss, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy by Dimitri Volkogonov and Stalin's Last Crime by Jonathon Brent and Vladimir Naumov.

BTW--You mentioned Orlando Figes. I think his book on the Russian Revolution is the single best book on the subject around.