Although Joseph Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in history, under him Russia also produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense and lasting power—from the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam to the opera Peter and the Wolf, the film Alexander Nevsky, and the novels The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago. Revisiting a world where the dictator decides whether artists will be successful, imprisoned, or executed, Andy McSmith profiles such figures as Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, and Dmitri Shostakovich.