“Tell me a subject that’s bigger than Stalin,” Stephen Kotkin asked in his office on Thursday. “30 years in power. Military industrial complex. Victory over Hitler in World War II. The Cold War. Gold ...

In the last 200 years the idea of will has gone from the most admired philosophical concept to the most maligned. Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps seemed the only way to go for Beethoven. Now we ...

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," published in America by Knopf last month and recently named History Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. Almost ...

STALIN: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (600 pp.)—Isaac Deufscher—Oxford ($5). In 1915, Joseph Stalin, professional revolutionist, was exiled to Kureika, Siberia. At 35, he had given all of his adult years to ...

In his biography of Stalin, Leon Trotsky wrote that “the twentieth century . . . has returned us in many respects to the ways and methods of the Renaissance.” Stalin’s world, Trotsky proclaimed, had ...

As events would have it, the news of Alexei Navalny’s death came just two days after I’d finished reading the second volume of Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Joseph Stalin, which covers the period from ...

Stalin continues to fascinate–the central mystery within the riddle inside the enigma that was the Soviet Union. If you Google “Stalin, biography,” 166,000 websites come up. By signing up, you confirm ...