Joseph Stalin - Getty Images

Josef Stalin

Supplies train for the Russian transported during deportation to Siberia.

Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island

How Stalin won WW2.

Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower

How Stalin ran rings round the west.

Video podcastLife of the Week: Stalin.

Life of the Week: Stalin.

WW2 the big questions: the ‘Big Three’.

Stalin’s library: inside the mind of a dictator.

A family in Soviet Ukraine during the Holodomor

Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine

Russian civil war, 1919

General History

Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion

Uncovering the truth about WW2’s Katyn massacre.

Stalin: the real victor of WW2.

Hitler and Stalin: tyrants at war.

A composite image of Joseph Stalin (left) and Adolf Hitler

Second World War

Hitler and Stalin’s utopian dreams

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler watch a Nazi parade staged for the Italian dictators's visit to Germany. (Photo by Getty Images)

How do dictators seize power? The malevolent careers of eight 20th-century leaders explained

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler watch a Nazi parade staged for the Italian dictators's visit to Germany. (Photo by Getty Images)

Dictators explained.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini give a fascist salute

A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends.

Letters from World War Two leaders.

Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt exchanged almost 700 messages during the Second World War. (Illustration by Hugh Cowling for BBC History Magazine)

Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three’s war of words.

The death of Stalin.

Stalin’s early years and Mein Kampf.

The statue Worker and Kolkhoz Woman in Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Getty Images)

Communist Moscow.