A musical portrait of Stalin

There's something endlessly fascinating and inscrutable about Stalin, an austere workaholic who reveled in torturing, breaking and killing "friends" and enemies alike. Arguably the single most powerful and influential political leader of the 20th century. An utterly ruthless, amoral and highly intelligent psychopath who managed to take a dysfunctional, backward peasant state to nuclear superpower status in the span of 30 years -- at an immense and almost unfathomable cost to his people. You can feel the dread, the tension, the terror, in Shostakovich's 10th symphony, a "musical portrait of Stalin."