Joseph Stalin rises from a seminary dropout in Georgia, involved in bank robberies and underground agitation, to general secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee in 1922, a bureaucratic post he uses to outmaneuver every rival after Lenin's death two years later. The film traces his forced collectivization campaign of the early 1930s, which disrupts grain production and feeds into the 1932-33 famine that Ukrainians call the Holodomor, and follows the Great Purge of 1936-39, when hundreds of thousands, including former Bolshevik allies and Red Army commanders, are executed on fabricated charges. It covers his 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler, broken by the German invasion two years later, and the Soviet counterattacks at Moscow and Stalingrad that turn the war. The account closes with the postwar Eastern Bloc, the Soviet atomic bomb, and Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing his former boss, the moment that opens the record to everything the regime had kept hidden.