During his life Stalin engendered the extremes of hatred and love: it was impossible to ignore him. Greater, at his best, than Peter the Great; more brutal, at his worst, than Ivan the Terrible, the subject of this famous biography is himself sufficient explanation of the storm of controversy it aroused on publication. Some saw it as the rose-tinted apology of a former Communist, some as the bitter denunciation of a writer who had never subscribed to the Stalin cult. Deutscher’s bigoraphy is, in reality, an unbiased appraisal of a revolutionary despot, and this Pelican edition contains a wholly new chapter covering Stalin’s last years.