Joseph Stalin

The great grand strategist of the Cold War believed he failed in his most important task.

A new history examines their use in the past and considers their effectiveness for the future.

Watching the Ken Burns series on the U.S. and the Holocaust and thinking about American folk music.

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.

In 1932, Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for stories defending Soviet policies that led to the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.

My policy was to work for the best, while expanding NATO to prepare for the worst.

Hal Brands urges the U.S. to make China and Russia “pay exorbitantly” for their policies. History shows that has never worked.

John Gunther’s “Death Be Not Proud” defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.

For more than a century, Western oil companies have cycled into and out of Russia.

American pundits say Putin is undermining the international order. But the ability of great powers to ignore the rules is a lamentable part of the system.

Access to information only goes so far to explain the curious link between secrets and those who tell them.

There are important differences between Xi Jinping’s China and the Soviet Union, but the Cold War still offers clear strategic guidance for the U.S.

How a feisty, suicidal Nobel laureate infuriated both Hitler and Stalin, and stalled cancer research for fifty years along the way.

For more than 150 years after it was coined, “terrorism” meant violence inflicted by the state on its people. How did the word come to mean the reverse?

Hannah Arendt holds firm during the McCarthy era.

The New Yorker critic's new book is a sequel of sorts to "The Metaphysical Club."

How English and Esperanto offer competing visions of a universal language.

How Ivy Litvinov, the English-born wife of a Soviet ambassador, seduced America with wit, tea and soft diplomacy.

The cultural contradictions of Call of Duty.

A new history shows how the glut of US military bases abroad has led to a constant state of military conflict.