Autopsy for an empire : the seven leaders who built the Soviet regime / Dmitri Volkogonov ; edited and translated by Harold Shukman.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [537]-556) and index.

Introduction: The Path of Leaders -- 1. The First Leader: Vladimir Lenin -- 2. The Second Leader: Joseph Stalin -- 3. The Third Leader: Nikita Khrushchev -- 4. The Fourth Leader: Leonid Brezhnev -- 5. The Fifth Leader: Yuri Andropov -- 6. The Sixth Leader: Konstantin Chernenko -- 7. The Seventh Leader: Mikhail Gorbachev.

The late Dmitri Volkogonov emerged in the last decade of his life as the preeminent Russian historian of this century. Working tirelessly, at first at great personal risk, he explored every inch of previously off-limits archives to write a series of devastating biographies - of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky - which at last ripped the veils of Soviet lies that had swathed each of the three great founders.

His crowning achievement, however, is the account of the seven General Secretaries of the Soviet Empire in Autopsy for an Empire, a book that tells the entire history of the Soviet failure. He worked feverishly on the manuscript, despite a losing battle with cancer, and finished it just prior to his death in 1995.