 In both the Soviet Union and elsewhere he came to be portrayed as an "Oriental despot".The biographer Dmitri Volkogonov characterised him as "one of the most powerful figures in human history", while McDermott stated that Stalin had "concentrated unprecedented political authority in his hands", and Service noted that by the late 1930s, Stalin "had come closer to personal despotism than almost any monarch in history".McDermott nevertheless cautioned against "over-simplistic stereotypes"—promoted in the fiction of writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, and Anatoly Rybakov—that portrayed Stalin as an omnipotent and omnipresent tyrant who controlled every aspect of Soviet life through repression and totalitarianism.