Stalin, Volume 1

Siberian exiles in Monastyrskoe, administrative center of Turukhansk region (which was larger than Britain, France, and Germany combined), July 1915. Sverdlov, in glasses, is seated in the front row, next to him in a hat is Hryhory Petrovsky. Stalin is in the back row in a black hat. To Stalin’s right is Lev Kamenev and to his left is Suren Spandaryan, who died in these frozen wastes at age thirty-four. Kamenev was being subjected to a party “trial” for contradicting Lenin’s view that the Bolsheviks sought a Russian military defeat.

Lavr Kornilov, imperial Russia’s supreme military commander, 1917. Kornilov, Kerensky wrote, “spent little time in fashionable drawing-rooms, although their doors were always open to any officer of the General Staff. . . . He was regarded as rather shy and even somewhat of a ‘savage.’” In fact, Russian patriots looked to Kornilov for salvation.