No figure of the war is more monstrous or more consequential than Joseph Stalin. He led the Soviet Union to the victory that broke Nazi Germany — it was on the Eastern Front, in the vast bloodletting of battles like Stalingrad, that the bulk of the German army was destroyed, at a cost to his own people of some twenty-seven million dead. Yet Stalin was also one of history's great killers of his own citizens: the purges that executed hundreds of thousands, the Gulag that swallowed millions, the engineered famines and mass deportations. He took the title Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1943 and directed the war as supreme commander. Victor and mass murderer at once, he is impossible to weigh simply — and impossible to leave out.

K&C's figure gives Stalin in the plain white summer tunic of a Soviet marshal, blue breeches with the red stripe, pipe in hand — the studiedly simple, undecorated style he cultivated, part of the "man of the people" image his cult of personality was built around. He is one third of K&C's Yalta 1945 set of the Big Three, and pairs with his wartime ally the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill — and, across the Eastern Front, the German soldiers his Red Army ground down in the snow, like the Waffen-SS Grenadier at Kharkov. As the sombre centrepiece of a Soviet or a conference display, Stalin dominates the room, exactly as he meant to.

Model: RA060 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set