In the quick-scroll world of soundbites and ‘shorts’, academic professionals must pack their expertise into a concise form, writing ever shorter narratives. Sheila Fitzpatrick, an eminent Australian scholar of everything Soviet, delivers in shorthand. Her little book focuses on a single aspect of one person’s life with Joseph Stalin’s death.

The book is a useful account of the dying breath of a man whose name became synonymous with ‘Russia’. Fitzpatrick capitalises on decades of expert knowledge in the field so that even a complete newcomer to Soviet history could pick up the book and learn something. In a very confident, clear-cut fashion, Fitzpatrick guides the reader through the life of a dirt-poor cobbler’s son from rural Georgia to his final bodily state as an embalmed corpse – a figure whose spirit is still with us.

The book is straightforward in its organisation. The first quarter of the text, Chapter One, sketches the life of a boy with an interest in upward mobility. With his mother’s help, Joseph enrolled in an Orthodox seminary, which held some career promise. There, Orthodox Christianity was supplanted by radical Marxism. Characteristically, while engaged in his revolutionary activities, Joseph assumed the name Stalin, ‘man of steel’.