Stalin and his hangmen: an authoritative portrait of a tyrant and those who served him
- London: Penguin Viking, 2004
- xxvi, 528p.
Stalin could not have risen to power or stayed in power by his own ruthlessness alone. He needed others equally willing to exercise repression through brutality, cunning, and murder. This book analyses the pyschology that held the entire totalitarian regime together to exercise its dreadful effect on three generations of Russians, an effect so grotesque that it is still not fully acknowledged or understood.