Stalin, Volume 1

Gersh Brilliant, known as Grigory Sokolnikov (third from right), commander of the Turkestan front, with his subordinate Lazar Kaganovich (second from right) and indigenous members of the Bolshevik Turkestan Commission, fall 1920. Kaganovich would become a Stalin protégé in the central apparatus. Sokolnikov would become USSR finance commissar under Stalin and oversee the New Economic Policy.

Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, the would-be restorer of the great Mongol empire who instead unwittingly delivered Outer Mongolia into Soviet hands, photographed during his interrogation by Bolshevik capturers and wearing an imperial Russian St. George’s Cross for bravery on his Mongol caftan. He was said to rip out the hearts of those he captured and place them in bowls of skulls as offerings to the Tibetan Buddhist gods.