“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

FEW neurotics are geniuses. But many geniuses are neurotics. Lev Davidovich Bronstein was more than a little of both. This son of a prosperous Jewish farmer was born in the Ukraine in 1879. He died in ...

Russians pored last week over No. 8 of the magazine Bolshevik, absorbed like eager sponges what Josef Stalin said to German biographer Emil Ludwig (TIME, Jan. 4). Shrewd. Dr. Ludwig has been trying to ...

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 ...