Fluke Kelso - a former historian who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives - is visited in his hotel room by a man who claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and had helped steal the dictator's private papers Kelso decides to check out the old man's story But what starts as idle curiosity soon turns into a murderous chase across Russia, where the final secret of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century