In 1949, during Stalin's reign as dictator of the Soviet Union, obituaries in the Communist-controlled newspapers stopped including the ages of those who died, "presumably for fear of revealing a declining life expectancy," Jonathan Daly writes in The Man Who Knew Russia , his new biography of Richard Pipes. Such crude censorship failed to conceal the grim reality of Bolshevik rule from those millions who were unfortunate enough to be trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Yet many European and North