Stalin, Volume 1

Red Army bayonets, celebrating victory over Baron Pyotr Wrangel, the last of the White armies, Crimea, 1920.

Golgotha. What imperial weakness and vaulting ambition, epic miscalculation and idées fixes hath wrought—famine victims, Tsaritsyn, winter 1921–22. In 1925, the city would be renamed Stalingrad.

Stalin and Lenin at Gorki, just outside Moscow, September 1922. Photograph by Maria Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister. Stalin had images of his visit published to show Lenin’s supposed recovery—and his own proximity to the Bolshevik leader. This pose was not among those published.

12th Party Congress, April 1923, Stalin, among some of the more than eight hundred attendees at the Grand Kremlin Palace, without entourage. Lenin did not attend. Almost immediately afterward, Krupskaya suddenly brought forward dictation, attributed to Lenin, calling for Stalin’s removal as general secretary.

Lenin, Gorki, 1923, one of his last photos, with doctor and nurse, taken by Maria Ulyanova.

Lenin’s funeral, Stalin and Molotov with the casket, a frigid January 27, 1924.

Sculptor Sergei Merkurov fashioning Lenin’s death mask, which would find its way into Stalin’s office.

Stalin’s bestseller, On Lenin and Leninism (Moscow, 1924). Mastery of the ideology, not just the apparatus, undergirded Stalin’s power.