Stalin, Volume 1

Matylda Krzesinska, Polish-born prima ballerina of Russia’s Imperial Mariinsky Theater, and former mistress of Nicholas II, St. Petersburg, 1900. Her elegant mansion was seized in 1917 and served as the first Bolshevik headquarters until July. (The ballerina emigrated to France, married one of her two Romanov grand duke lovers, and lived to just shy of one hundred years old.) Photograph by Yakov Steinberg.