Stalin, Volume 1

Three Caucasus Musketeers, summer 1926: Mikoyan, Stalin, Orjonikidze, in a retouched photograph published in the newspaper.

Poteshny Dvorets (Amusement Palace), triangles on the roof dating from the seventeenth century, the only surviving Boyar residence inside the Kremlin, where Stalin and his family lived. Alexei Rykov lived here, too. The double-headed eagles on the Kremlin towers would be removed only in the 1930s.

Zubalovo-4, in the secluded, leafy western outskirts of Moscow, the Stalin family dacha from 1919, formerly owned by the ethnic Georgian Levon Zubalashvili [Russified to Zubalov], a Baku oil magnate.

Vasily Stalin (b. 1921, left) and Artyom Sergeyev, Yalta, 1926. Artyom was born a few months after Vasily and, after his father was killed that year in a civil war accident, was informally adopted into the Stalin household.

Nadya and newborn Svetlana, 1927. Portrait by Moscow’s renowned private studio photographer Nikolai Svishchov-Paola. Photo album of Sergei Alliluyev, Stalin’s father-in-law.

Yakov Jugashvili (b. 1907), Stalin’s first child from his marriage to Kato Svanidze, circa 1927.