Stalin and the Lubianka

Vladimir Khaustov, a professor at the Federal Security Service Academy of Russia, is a recognized authority in the history of organs of state security. David Shearer specializes in Soviet and twentieth-century European history and is the author of Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953.

“Vladimir Khaustov and David Shearer offer an insider’s history of Stalin’s security organs from the early 1920s through Stalin’s death in March of 1953, introducing readers to the macabre, bizarre, and horrific world of Stalin’s NKVD as it executed and deported intellectuals, jailed and deported peasants, swept the cities clean of class enemies, liquidated old Bolsheviks, rained terror on innocent workers, specialists and peasants, and conducted wartime intelligence. With the growing ambiguity over Stalin’s role in Russian history, Khaustov and Shearer provide us with a timely dose of reality about the absolute evil of Stalin and the regime which he built.”—Paul Roderick Gregory, Research Fellow, The Hoover Institution