The Triumvirate of the Soviet Empire was made up of three men, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. A cult of personality and the secrecy of the Soviet archive system arose to protect them from blame for the atrocities committed by their direction. Dmitri Volkogonov, through his position as Chairman of the Presidential Commision examining the Soviet Archives (held under wraps by the KGB for three generations), paints a vivid and true portrait of these three men. He treats his subjects on the personal as well as the political/historical level. His application of a fine sense of economics and psychology make these biographies essential reading.

He makes the point that, even though the reputations of these men must be held responsible for the acts of repression and violence occurring under their leadership, the implementation of a communist/marxist ideology made the gulag, the purges of the 30's and 40's, the extermination of millions of peasants and authoritarian government inevitable.

To order click on a title below.

Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (paperback), by Dmitri Volkogonov. Stalin was the bully-boy, thug of the Bolshevik party and rose up to impose his gangsterism upon nearly half the globe.

Lenin: A new Biography, by Dmitri Volkogonov (hb). Lenin was the founder of the Communist Party, the philosopher who came up with the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" that, in the end, would ruin so many lives. His own life was one of hypocritical bourgeois comforts and he died a broken man.

Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary , by Dmitri Volkogonov (hb). Trotsky is most famous in this country for having been murdered by Stalin's KGB with an ax through the head while in exile in Mexico. Trotsky was, in fact, the military genius of the Communist Party. He engineered the victory of the Red Army over the Czarist forces during the Russian Revolution.

Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders who built the Soviet Regime (hb,528pp) by Dmitri Volkogonov is a great exposition of the Soviet Empire revealed through the stories of the men who made her. Dmitri Volkogonov was a general in the Soviet Military. After the fall of the communist government he had access to all of the secret archives housing information Soviet leaders did not want revealed to the world. Autopsy of an Empire is the last book by the great Volkogonov before his death in 1996. Having been a part of the Soviet apparatus gave him intimate knowledge of its interworkings. His position allowed him to see the poverty and destruction caused by a system focused on the collective and ignorant of the rights of the individual. Volkogonov's premise is that it was the system of communism that caused mass suffering throughout his homeland (even though individuals were complicit). Persecution, work camps and purges produced millions of deaths and stifled an entire people. His thesis is ably proved. This book is a must read for any lover of freedom and a great eye opening gift for anyone who opines the fall of the "Evil Empire".