Stalin's policies and gross miscalculations had led to this near disaster. His wholesale purges of the Red Army in 1937 and 1938 deprived the military of many of its most experienced officers.

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 ...

All of the arrests and exiles were documented, with the leader’s photos attached to his file. But after Stalin’s ascension to power, the photos were considered unfavorable. The untouchable ...

Bluecher’s voice was too loud for Stalin. Recalled to Moscow, he was named one of eight judges in the court-martial of Tukhachevsky, duly joined in the death sentence.

Stalin’s amendment of this of course has the greatest repercussions in nations like France, Italy, and Germany, where national characteristics and traditions are strongly developed and where the ...

However, in 1936, he, along with Soviet Marshal Tukhachevsky and other high officers of the Soviet army, was accused by the Stalin apparatus of having had treasonous dealings with the Nazi regime ...

John Mosier, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, says in his latest book, Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, that Stalin and his gang could be trusted. They ...

Stalin, however, did not want aircraft carriers, preferring to put his faith in battleships and cruisers.

While Shostakovich was at work on the Fifth, one of his highest-ranking supporters, the Soviet general Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had been executed.