Nick Shepley 
Stalin, the Five Year Plans and the Gulags [PDF ebook] 
Slavery and Terror 1929-53

From the personal accounts of those devoured by the great darkness of Stalin’s Russia, the Explaining History series details the explosive growth of Stalin’s vast industrial revolution, and the explosive growth of his terror and the slave camps that held his victims.The lives of workers, peasants, Poles and Jews, intellectuals and secret policemen are explained here in an accessible and straight forward way, as is the seemingly impenetrable thinking of Joseph Stalin.