Incredible book and should be essential reading. It's not a biography, as I heard it described a few years ago, but an unrelentingly thorough historical analysis of Joseph Stalin, his role in the USSR, and the various criticisms of him that have entered common discourse to the point where people who don't know anything about history know that "Hitler and Stalin" are history's greatest monsters. Losurdo looks at how this came to be and deconstructs anti-communist narratives using sources that even the most ardent anti-communist can't deny are valid (capitalist historians, Stalin's enemies, etc). It's an incredible piece of scholarship that, by the end, demonstrates just how deeply our understanding of historical events and figures have been shaped by the specific ideology of capitalist power