Stalin:The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore (2004)

Stalin, Bulganin, Kruschev, Molotov, Beria, Yezhov, Mikoyan, Zdanov, Zhukov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and so many others are associated with mass murder in the name of a cause, but in the end in the name of one man's egomania. The size of the author's research task on Russian documents must make the book a research epic (720 pages). He managed to do it all in 5 years from Kremlin archives to publication. The killings are weird to read about because their scale is so great and within the lifetime of this reader. Then later a few thousand deaths here or there seems banal in face of the millions of individual tragedies. Even among comrades and colleagues Stalin got rid of those he got tired of, or suspected of outshining him, or of being an alternative leader. And he could always read a report or receive a verbal account in person from torturers 'working' not far away in the Lubianka. He headed a team of Commissar-Butchers who would take a train to a region and arrange executions of local officials by the hundred, or even greater 'units' sometimes, in order to solve some 'problem'. Poskrebyshev, Stalin's ' Cabinet Secretary' with his space outside the door to Stalin's office,
was also the weather vane to his master's moods as the main players from the corridors of the Kremlin breezed before him to access the red Tsar.
The account starts in 1932 with Stalin as General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party and by no means yet the dictator he was to become. The Second World War with the invasion by Germany and the suffering of the soldiery in its repulse, the meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill, the forming of the Communist Bloc are all a part of this vast story ending in 1953 with the death of Stalin.

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Dip into it anywhere at first*, look at the photographs, even say some of the names aloud, recall what you know about the period and then start from the beginning. Take a month, read other books for a while if you like, but it will end up as an engrossing read. 8 out of 10. (A point deducted for the pain in just getting into it)

*For example, page 479 where Stalin in Teheran together with Churchill and Roosevelt over dinner seems to suggest shooting "50,000 or 100,000" surviving German officers at the end of the war. Churchill heads for the door but is brought back by Stalin and Molotov ....only joking!
The Georgian Joseph Djugashvili, known as 'Soso' and 'Koba', adopted the Russian word for 'STEEL' and became known as Joseph Stalin.