Joseph Stalin addresses voters in Moscow on the even of the election in which Russians voted for the first time under the new constitution, Dec. 22, 1937. Bettmann / Getty Images.

Sullivan cites Stalin’s grandson, the Russian theater director Alexander Burdonsky, who describes his aunt as a princess who tried to escape her fate and to live normally, but was always doomed.

Having gained access to secret documents in Russia’s archives, biographer Edvard Radzinsky wrote a comprehensive biography about Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) who, after dismantling the tsarist ...

Kotkin’s biography of Joseph Stalin is already monumental—and this is just the first entry in a planned trilogy. Stalin emerges here as a more vivid and complete figure than he does in countless other ...

Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin, Penguin, 949 pages, $25 The first volume of Kotkin’s biography of Josef Stalin looks at the Soviet leader’s early and ...

On a business trip to the Republic of Georgia, I was invited by a local employee to visit Joseph Stalin’s birthplace. I’m not sure I knew at the time, in 2015, that Stalin was from Georgia.

A statue of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin outside the Stalin Museum in his birthplace of Gori, Georgia in this illustrative image from 2011. An Orthodox priest was criticized for his blessing ...