Most Western historians believe that Joseph Stalin masterminded the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, a hard-line Bolshevik whom the Soviet dictator may have seen as a rival. Conquest ( Harvest o...
Written in a fast-moving informative style, this absorbing biography charts Stalin's rise from obscure revolutionary flunky to power-mad dictator. Borrowing liberally from unsealed memoirs of survi...