For all the blood on his hands, Josef Stalin is indisputably one of the most important historical figures of the 20 th century. But where many biographers agree with Leon Trotsky's waspish dismissal ...

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, volume II, Stephen Kotkin, Penguin Press 1119 pp. In April 1934, the poet Osip Mandelstam bumped into Boris Pasternak on a Moscow street. He recited verses that ...

Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton historian and author of a new biography of Joseph Stalin, sees similarities in the former Soviet dictator’s leadership style and that of Russia’s incumbent strongman, ...

On Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin. Stalin is a formidably documented, densely detailed book of 739 pages that gets the reader from Stalin’s birth in 1878 up to 1928, just six ...

To history he will always be known as Joseph Stalin, the heir of Vladimir Lenin, the killer of Leon Trotsky, the unquestioned dictator of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. But he was born ...

November 2, 2018—Professor Stephen Kotkin has won the seventeenth annual Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Arthur Ross Book Award for Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (Random House), the second ...

We all think we know Stalin. He was the brutal and vengeful dictator of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until 1953, when, mercifully, he died before he could do any more damage. He was the ...

Stephen Kotkin’s meticulous biography of Joseph Stalin dispenses with the myth that he was an intellectual dullard, showing that he was quite shrewd as well as forceful. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume ...

Stephen Kotkin and Keith Gessen will appear at Strand Book Store tonight, February 18 from 7 to 8 PM. Historian and professor Stephen Kotkin presents his New York Times critically acclaimed biography ...

How did the “fugitive vagrant” Ioseb Jugashvili—poet, bank robber, student of Esperanto, and Marxist revolutionary—become Joseph Stalin, the architect of Soviet collectivism and the Great Purges? In ...