Even now, more than a decade after the fall of communism, it is quite an event when a former member of the Soviet politburo writes a book condemning the Leninist project as a crime against humanity for which the criminals were never tried. Alexander Yakovlev was a senior, long-serving central committee member who rose under Gorbachev to advise on perestroika, and then under Yeltsin headed the commission on the rehabilitation of the victims of political repression. While Nazi Germany faced defeat and retribution in the Nuremburg trials, Soviet Russia was crowned by victory in 1945 and an empire that lasted for half a century. Yakovlev’s statement is powerful: “Fundamentally the responsibility for the genocide or rather democide . . . in the Soviet Union rests on the ideology of Bolshevism.” He turns to the ideal of communism itself: “Any social system based on blood-letting has to be swept off the face of the earth, for it preaches the demonic religion of evil.” This means something, from the politburo.

Qualified as he is to tell this story, he does not disappoint or pull punches: he demolishes the old excuse that Stalin was a distortion of Lenin’s heroic revolutionary dream. If anyone wants to understand Stalin’s murder of more than 20m innocents and of the truth, this book tells it plainly and fascinatingly: in its moving and unpretentious way, it stands alongside the work of titans such as Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Yevgenia Ginsburg, Roy Medvedev, Dmitri Volkogonov, Milovan Djilas and Robert Conquest as among the best 250 pages you will ever read on Stalin.

While personal moments grant the book its special moral power, it is also a systematic, archivally based revelation and indictment of the regime Yakovlev served for most of his life. He describes his desk piling up with “bloodstained documents”. He recalls the workers on his home collective farm being arrested and shot in 1937; he describes how, in 1945, he saw trains bearing Russian ex-POWs in Germany through Yaroslav on their way to Stalin’s camps in the east: “Railway cars, small windows with iron bars; thin, pale, bewildered faces at the windows . . . Tossed out through the bars, rolled-up scraps of papers with the names and addresses of relatives and appeals to let them know that so-and-so was alive . . .”

He exposes his confusion when, at the 20th congress, he heard the new leader, Khrushchev, denounce the dead Stalin, his teacher and patron: “We left with bowed heads . . . I was so bewildered.” He embarked on “a double life of agonising dissimulation. I conformed”, until Gorbachev and particularly Yeltsin allowed him to play a role in healing and redemption: this book is part of it. While the history of his country over the past 70 years is “an unbroken sequence of suffering on the part of some and crime on the part of others”, he stresses, and this is hugely important, that this goes beyond the guilt of a single individual. He names “our leaders” who “all deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity”: Lenin is number one, then Stalin and then Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Khrushchev himself and so on.

Yakovlev tells the story by the type of crime: he begins with how Lenin and Stalin killed their enemies’ children. “Juveniles aged 12 and over are . . . subject to the full range of criminal penalties,” went Stalin’s law of 1932; 12-year-olds were soon being shot for being the sons of their fathers. Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene of this heartbreaking book concerns a male prisoner sent to make an inventory of such a camp: hordes of five-year-olds ran up “crying, ‘Papa papachka, why did you take so long?’ ” Their real papas had, of course, been executed. Even a year after Stalin’s death, there were 884,057 children in the camps.

Then he shows how Lenin terrorised the peasantry and Stalin followed his lead, how, even before the Great Terror, Molotov was planning the execution or deportation of hundreds of thousands of peasants. It was the same story with the intelligentsia and the clergy. The Soviets shot 157,000 of their own soldiers (or 15 divisions) during the war; returning POWs were dispatched to Siberia where most died. He moves on to the genocides of Poles, Germans and Koreans living in Russia before the war and then the Chechens and others afterwards, deported en masse and murdered in vast numbers. Fascinatingly, he chronicles Stalin’s and the USSR’s institutional anti-semitism: he uses his own experiences with one of Stalin’s most disgusting mass murderers, Matvei Shkiryatov, who first attacked young Yakovlev for not being anti-semitic enough and then tried to blame him for being too anti- semitic, of which he was entirely innocent. Until these crimes are admitted and understood, Yakovlev believes Russia will remain “bogged down in the mire . . . Only when it has shaken free of Bolshevism can Russia hope to be healed”.

Simon Sebag Montefiore will publish Stalin and his Inner Circle next year. A Century of Violence is available at the Books Direct price of £18 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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