The novel, looks at the crimes that Stalin committed against his people in the Soviet Union and how he connived to get rid of the members of his own party, the Bolshevik party, in the purges of the 1930s. As a result of getting rid of his rivals, and even erasing those who were not plotting against him, Stalin made himself sole and most powerful ruler in the country and the book develops the path to all out power that he took, form his origins in the town of Gori in modern day Georgia to the corridors of the Kremlin in Mosocw. The crimes of Stalin were only a follow on to those that Vladimir Lenin made in the aftermath of the Revolution in 1917 and Two Steps from Socialism delves into the ways in which people, often innocent, were elimintaed and the methods of torture that were used in the process. Lenin instigated a terror campaign against not just White officers and supporters but also other people, even socialists who were not in favour of his newly founded regime. Stalin picked up the mantle from Lenin after he died in 1924. Both Stalin and Lenin had their willing accomplices in the Soviet Union and Boris Guberman discusses the crimes committed against mostly innocent people.
