The 18th of July, 1942, was a hot summer day in Krasnodar, a city in the Russian Caucasus, near the Black Sea. On that day, as my grandfather Mark Nikolaevich Medish was taking a Sunday afternoon ...

In the ruins of postwar Europe, Stalin’s Soviet Union moves from “liberator” to occupier, using Red Army power, the NKVD, ...

Stalin hesitated for almost two weeks in May-June 1937 before giving the NKVD the go ahead for the purge of the top Red Army leadership. His response to the growing evidence provided by Nicolai Yezhov ...

In the summer of 2004, a group of activists near the city of Saransk made a gruesome discovery: Some 500-700 corpses buried in shallow mass graves in a forest. They ...

With its predecessors including the Tsarist intelligence agencies, the Bolsheivk’s shield and sword and Stalin’s NKVD, the KGB was no ordinary service to the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Knocking ...

There was a lapse of five years between the first time that the FBI’s heat came on Stalinist agent Mark Zborowski, in 1953, and when he finally appeared before the court for perjury in 1958. His ...

The battle for Moscow, which officially lasted from Sept. 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, pitted two gargantuan armies against each other in what was the greatest clash of arms in human history. Seven ...

STALIN (516 pp.)—Leon Trotsky— Harper ($5). It is as hard for a man to escape assassination as it is to lay a ghost. If the assassins know their trade, if they are backed by the resources and the ...

Stalin spoke of the continuity of Soviet policy. If anything were to happen to him, there would be good men ready to step into his shoes. —Winston Churchill in Triumph and Tragedy Georgy Malenkov was ...

Reverse psychology -- telling someone not to do the very thing you want them to do -- is a tactic often used to control truculent children. But when Russian lawyer and historian Aleksandr Busarov ...

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 ...

The Cold War eased slightly in 1953. In July, an armistice ended fighting in the Korean War, though a peace treaty remained out of reach. It was the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on March 5 ...