Edward Gibbon sits proudly upon my bookshelf. A set of volumes that I own, neatly stacked, comprises his “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” What do you make of me because it is ...

DUEL FOR EUROPE — John Scoff —Houghton Mifflin ($3.50). When Stalin set the European tinder-box ablaze by signing the nonaggression pact with Hitler in August 1939, the civilized world gasped: How ...

International confrontations and the strains within alliances remain both topical and fascinating, and few instances have been as central to our understanding of history as the tensions between the ...

With no advance publicity at all, Simon & Schuster last week published The Rainbow ($2.50). It is the $20,000 “Stalin Prize novel for 1943.” Most U.S. readers do not associate Stalin with literary ...

What caused Joseph Stalin to become one of history’s most notorious mass murders? Unlike Adolph Hitler, whose victims were anonymous Jews and other “undesirables” whom he did not know, Stalin’s ...

Fifty years after dictator Josef Stalin died, apparently felled by a brain hemorrhage at his dacha, an exhaustive study of long-secret Soviet records lends new weight to an old theory that he was ...

STALIN'S DAUGHTER: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, by Rosemary Sullivan. Harper, 741 pp., $35. "Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the ...

Is there any point to another Stalin biography? Before the opening of the old Soviet archives, three decades ago, the best historians mastered the limited available sources and proceeded to fill in ...

The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War; by Alan Philps; Pegasus Books; 464 pp, $29.95 During World War II, the Metropol provided a base for a ...

In celebration of the winners of this year’s Arthur Ross Book Award: Stephen Kotkin, Michael J. Green, and Masha Gessen, Gideon Rose hosts a conversation with Stephen Kotkin on his book, Stalin: ...