About the book: 2012 / The book of Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, leading researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, director of the Documentation Center "People's Archive" Boris Ilizarov - about the spiritual , the intellectual and physical appearance of J.V. Stalin, a man who largely determined the history of Russia and the whole world in the twentieth century. Almost everything stated here is written on the basis of little-known sources. Stalin was much simpler, and sometimes more vulgar, more insidious and evil than his comrades and contemporaries, Stalin’s apologists, who knew little, and most importantly, who dared and wanted to know, told about it. At the same time, he was a much more complex, contradictory, versatile and extraordinary nature than what survivors of the “cult of personality” write about him. But this book is not only about Stalin, his era and the people whose lives and fates he influenced - it about all of us, forced from the moment of birth to the moment of death to face the choice of good or evil.