Josef Stalin rose from obscure origins in Georgia to rule the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. RFE/RL takes a look at some images from his early life. (11 PHOTOS) ...

The subtitle of Edvard Radzinsky’s bitterly condemnatory life of Stalin sounds too much like an advertisement: “The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents From Russia’s ...

From an early age, Stalin was an avid reader. In fact, according to Kotkin, while historians have focused on Stalin’s childhood “street gang” in Gori as an important influence, “what stood ...

In an exceptionally ambitious biography— the first volume of a projected three takes us from Stalin’s birth, in 1878, up to 1928 in just under 1,000 pages—Stephen Kotkin, a history professor ...

Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin, Penguin, 949 pages, $25 The first volume of Kotkin’s biography of Josef Stalin looks at the Soviet leader’s early and ...

Stalin: A Biography By Robert Service Harvard University Press, 760 pp. $29.95 ...

71 years ago today, on March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died. Born December 18, 1878, he had ruled over Russia in various capacities from 1921 until his death, and changed the world in the process ...

Traits of suspicion and intrigue were evident early on, and a capacity for violence. Stalin’s mother had hoped he would become a priest. ... wrote hefty volumes on Stalin’s life, ...

It delved into the early life of the Soviet Union's dictatorial leader. ... "But I did think that there was something pretty elemental about the life of Stalin, especially before 1917.