“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 ...

From a Georgian seminary student to the ruthless leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin reshaped the 20th century. This biography traces his rise through the Bolshevik Revolution, his brutal ...

2005-05-07T12:00:12-04:00https://ximage.c-spanvideo.org ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so outraged at the anti-communism of film star John Wayne that he plotted to have him murdered, according to a new biography of the American actor. “John Wayne -- The ...