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 ...

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.

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.

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.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953.

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 ...