By 1945, the guns were already sounding like his own machinery. Stalin stood in Red Square after Berlin had fallen, the Red Army had taken the city in April, and Germany surrendered in May. At the Yalta Conference in February, he had wrung reparations and influence from Churchill and Roosevelt, and now the Soviet Union sat at the centre of Europe, victorious and feared.

Long before that triumph, the boy from Gori had begun as Ioseb Jughashvili, born on 18 December 1878 in a poor Georgian family. His father Besarion was a declining shoemaker and an alcoholic; his mother Ekaterine moved with him through nine rented rooms after leaving home in 1883. A smallpox infection scarred his face, and a phaeton accident at twelve left his left arm permanently weakened.

He went from the Gori Church School to the Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894, then abandoned priesthood for revolution. By 1899 he had left the seminary, worked at the Tiflis observatory, and joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He helped organise May Day strikes, edited Pravda, and met Lenin in Tampere in 1905, while bank robberies and exiles to Siberia hardened him into the Bolshevik known as Koba.

The real turn came after Lenin’s death in January 1924. Stalin, already General Secretary since 1922, used party appointments, loyalists, and the language of “socialism in one country” to outmanoeuvre Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. By the late 1920s he had become the supreme leader, and places such as Stalino and Stalingrad were renamed in his honour.

Then came the cost. His first five-year plan, launched in 1928, drove collectivisation and industrialisation, but the 1932 to 1933 famine killed millions, including in Ukraine’s Holodomor. Between 1936 and 1938, the Great Purge sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths, while some 18 million passed through the Gulag. Stalin’s rule built factories and fear together.

War made him both indispensable and ruthless. In 1939 he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, then, after Hitler invaded in June 1941, he led the Soviet war effort from Moscow. The Red Army held Stalingrad, took Berlin, and forced the Axis into retreat. In August 1949 the Soviet atomic bomb was tested, and the USSR emerged as a superpower opposite the United States.

The ending was quieter and no less grim. On 1 March 1953, Stalin was found semi-conscious on the floor of his Kuntsevo dacha; he died on 5 March of a cerebral haemorrhage. After the funeral in Lenin’s Mausoleum on 9 March, Nikita Khrushchev later denounced his rule in 1956, but the name and the wreckage remained. Stalin had ruled from 1924 to 1953, and the century never quite escaped him.