Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

Pyotr Stolypin (second from the right, in white), who succeeded Witte as prime minister and, concurrently, Durnovó as interior minister, in Kiev, August 1911, as Nicholas II greets peasants of Kiev province. Stolypin would shortly fall to an assassin in the Kiev Opera House.

A metaphor for the hollowing autocracy: Stolypin’s state dacha, August 12, 1906. During this earlier assassination attempt, twenty-eight people died, including the prime minister’s fifteen-year-old daughter. Photographed by Karl Bulla.

Queen Victoria (lower center) and her royal relatives: German Kaiser Wilhelm II (lower left, looking up), the future Russian tsar Nicholas II (bowler hat), at the Coburg Palace, Germany, April 21, 1894, two days after the wedding of Victoria’s grandchildren Princess Victoria Melita (“Ducky”) of Saxe-Coburg/Edinburgh and Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, Germany. Alix of Hesse, another grandchild and the sister of the groom, had just acceded to Nicholas’s proposal for marriage and soon became Alexandra of Russia.

Alexei, heir to the throne, age six, with his naval attendant, Andrei Derevenko, on a specially outfitted bicycle, in the homeland of the tsarevich’s mother, August 1910. To prevent fatigue or even a bruise—from which the hemophiliac boy could bleed to death—Alexei was often hand carried as well. He inherited the life-threatening condition from his mother and she from Queen Victoria.

Besarion “Beso” Jugashvili. The only known image of what is thought to be Beso, Stalin’s father.

Ketevan “Keke” Geladze, Stalin’s mother.

Stalin’s birth house, Gori, Georgia.

Yakobi “Koba” Egnatashvili, Gori tavern owner, falsely rumored to have been Stalin’s father. He paid for Stalin’s education.