Stalin, Volume 1

Stalin and the military: 14th Party Conference, Moscow, April 1925. Left to right: Mikhail Lashevich (a deputy war commissar), Mikhail Frunze (war commissar), Alexander Smirnov, Alexei Rykov, Klimenty Voroshilov (Moscow military district commander), Stalin, Mykola Skrypnik, Andrei Bubnov (head of the Red Army political department), Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, Józef Unszlicht (a deputy war commissar). Frunze, who had replaced Trotsky, would be dead before the year was out. Stalin would promote his man Voroshilov.

Felix Dzierzynski, Soviet secret police chief, on a recuperative holiday, Sukhum, Abkhazia, Black Sea coast, 1922. Long in ill health and overworked, he would die of a heart attack in summer 1926.