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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the aftermath of Lenin’s death in January 1924, Joseph Stalin—already secretary-general of the Communist Party—emerged as the outright leader of the Soviet Union. “Right through 1927,” Stephen ...

Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 976 pp., $40.00. ANYONE UNFAMILIAR with the quality of Stephen Kotkin’s four earlier books on the ...