Stalin hesitated for almost two weeks in May-June 1937 before giving the NKVD the go ahead for the purge of the top Red Army leadership. His response to the growing evidence provided by Nicolai Yezhov ...

In the summer of 2004, a group of activists near the city of Saransk made a gruesome discovery: Some 500-700 corpses buried in shallow mass graves in a forest. They ...

In 1940, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the elimination of his most dangerous political rival. Ramón Mercader, an NKVD ...

STALIN (516 pp.)—Leon Trotsky— Harper ($5). It is as hard for a man to escape assassination as it is to lay a ghost. If the assassins know their trade, if they are backed by the resources and the ...

Reverse psychology -- telling someone not to do the very thing you want them to do -- is a tactic often used to control truculent children. But when Russian lawyer and historian Aleksandr Busarov ...

With its predecessors including the Tsarist intelligence agencies, the Bolsheivk’s shield and sword and Stalin’s NKVD, the KGB was no ordinary service to the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Knocking ...

There was a lapse of five years between the first time that the FBI’s heat came on Stalinist agent Mark Zborowski, in 1953, and when he finally appeared before the court for perjury in 1958. His ...

On December 15, 1937, at the height of the Great Terror in Stalin's Soviet Union, the ethnic cleansing of thousands of Greeks ...

MOSCOW — A Russian human rights group has published a database containing personal information about nearly 40,000 members of the notorious security force that carried out Soviet dictator Joseph ...

Stalin spoke of the continuity of Soviet policy. If anything were to happen to him, there would be good men ready to step into his shoes. —Winston Churchill in Triumph and Tragedy Georgy Malenkov was ...

On a recent Sunday morning at 11 o'clock, a dozen people, mostly elderly, gathered in front of an elegant apartment building on a sun-dappled street in central Moscow. Ksenia Polunina stepped up to ...