Stalin was not the first Russian ruler to repress his people. Under the tsars, Russian peasants endured a situation that was little better than slavery; they were not emancipated until 1863, the same year that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in the United States. Lenin borrowed the idea of a repressive secret police from the tsars, and used it to help secure the gains of the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin, however, established a program of state terror that was unlike anything the world had ever seen; his "accomplishment" has been exceeded only by the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong.

The extermination of the kulaks was only the first step in Stalin's program of state terror. In 1934 he initiated a purge of the Communist Party that removed from power virtually every one of the original Bolsheviks still in office, most of whom opposed Stalin's plans. Eventually the purge included...