This is the first major biography of the Soviet leader to appear in two decades, and comes as the world marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is a tremendous achievement. Sebestyen has…

If the Bolsheviks had never seized power a century ago this month, probably the most famous Georgian of the twentieth century would have been Irakli Tsereteli. Tsereteli was one of the leading figures in the…

History doesn’t get better than this. Nicolaevsky was one of the great socialist historians, author of a terrific biography of Karl Marx, and participant in the 1917 revolution in Russia. In this book, written some…

To anyone who has seen the recent film on the death of Stalin, the character of Lavrenty Beria, played by Simon Russell Beale, may now be familiar. Though the film was a comedy (of sorts),…

I don’t think I’ll be giving anything away by saying what the secret was: Stalin was an agent of the tsarist police, the Okhrana, from 1906 until 1912. Isaac Don Levine, who wrote the first…

I first came across Isaac Don Levine while researching the question of whether Stalin had been an agent of the tsarist police — an Okhrana mole inside the Bolshevik Party. Levine published a letter claiming…

Charlotte Hobson has written a book that touches on two subjects that interest me enormously: the Russian Revolution and time travel. Without giving away too much of the plot — and there is a central…

John Medhurst’s new book is essential reading for anyone who (a) thinks of themselves as being progressive or on the left or (b) has something positive to say about Lenin or Trotsky. Actually, (b) is…

Timothy Snyder is an internationally-recognised expert on tyranny. His previous books have included studies of both right-wing and left-wing tyrannical regimes, focussing on Stalinism and Nazism. So when he writes a book that is, at…