STALIN'S MARSHALS

The French know the twenty-six marshals of Napoleon. But what do they know of the seventeen elevated by Stalin?

Yet it is to them that we owe the creation of the Red Army and its formidable victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Some rank among the greatest commanders of the last century: Tukhachevsky, Shaposhnikov, Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Konev, Rokossovsky, Malinovsky, Tolbukhin.

Their names are also linked to the conquest of Eastern and Central Europe and its integration into the Soviet world. Less well known is the fact that many of them played an important political role in the decade following Stalin's death, and up to the late 1960s.

This unique work, drawing exclusively on Russian sources, explains the logic at work in Stalin's military and human choices. It traces astonishing individual paths — sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical, always unexpected. The account of these seventeen parallel lives thus composes an immense fresco spanning from the First World War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the Pacific Ocean to Berlin, from the glorious parades on Red Square to the cells of the Lubyanka.

Jealous of one another, fearful before their master, sometimes concealing terrible secrets, the seventeen finally emerge from the unjust anonymity that, for most of them, has been the rule until today.