Lenin's Embalmers by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson (Panther, £6.99 in UK)

A macabre chapter of Russian history, relatively brief but well told, and very revealing of the values and mood of the Stalin years. Stalin, with his clerical training, understood fully the value of relics and embalmed heroes, so Lenin was an obvious choice for this form of canonisation and public display. The Zbarskys father and son (Ilya is the younger generation) were biochemists shouldered with the rather grisly operation of keeping fresh and lifelike Lenin's already decaying corpse. There were, inevitably, later Soviet candidates for the same embalming process. A touch of black humour enlivens this otherwise grim account of a terrible era under one of the great tyrants of history.