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Historical person

Joseph Stalin

1878–1953

Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia, became a professional revolutionary after leaving the Tiflis theological seminary and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic movement. He organised underground activity, endured arrest and exile, and rose within the party during the revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing civil war. Appointed general secretary in 1922, Stalin used control over appointments and alliances within the Communist Party to defeat rivals after Lenin’s death and establish personal dominance by the end of the 1920s.

Stalin’s rule transformed the Soviet Union through forced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation at immense human cost. Famine, mass deportations, the Gulag and the Great Terror killed or imprisoned millions. After the 1939 pact with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union was invaded in June 1941; Stalin then became the central political leader of the Soviet war effort and emerged in 1945 controlling much of eastern Europe. Post-war repression, ideological campaigns and confrontation with the Western powers continued until his death in 1953, while an elaborate cult of personality presented his dictatorship as infallible leadership.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin examines Joseph Stalin at the centre of the ruling circle that carried out purges, wartime mobilisation and mass repression, while Young Stalin reconstructs his earlier life as a Georgian seminarian, underground organiser, conspirator and Bolshevik revolutionary. Montefiore’s novel Sashenka brings Stalin into the world of an elite Soviet family whose security collapses during the terror, showing how political loyalty becomes inseparable from private survival. Joseph Kanon’s The Good German places Stalin at Potsdam in 1945, where the alliance that defeated Hitler is already hardening into rivalry over occupied Germany. Max Hastings’ All Hell Let Loose treats Stalin as one of the principal wartime leaders while setting his strategic decisions beside the far larger experience of Soviet soldiers and civilians.

Periods

Periods linked to Joseph Stalin

Grand Alliance1941–1945 CE Nazi Germany1933–1945

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Joseph Stalin (11 series)

Morland Dynasty in Order

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles 36 books 4.4(27,265)

The Morland Dynasty is a thirty-six-book family saga tracing the fictional Morlands of Yorkshire from 1434 to the approach of the Second World War. Beginning with the marriage of Robert Morland and Eleanor, a ward of the Beaufort family, the sequence follows successive generations as Morland Place grows…

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Breaking Point in Order

by John Rhodes 4 books 4.5(2,954)

The Breaking Point series follows RAF fighter pilot Johnnie Shaux and mathematician-turned-military analyst Eleanor Rand, later Eleanor Shaux, through the successive years of the Second World War. Johnnie experiences the conflict from cockpits, airfields and operational units, while Eleanor works in headquarters where intelligence, logistics and strategy determine…

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Caje Cole in Order

by David Healey 11 books 4.4(46,325)

The Caje Cole series follows an Appalachian hunter serving as an American sniper from the Normandy landings through the final campaigns in Europe and into the Korean War. The Second World War novels place Cole against German marksmen during D-Day, the Falaise fighting, the Ardennes offensive and Operation…

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The Century Trilogy in Order

by Ken Follett 3 books 4.3(838,293)

The Century Trilogy follows five interconnected families from Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States from the years before the First World War to the collapse of Communist rule in Europe. Across three generations, miners, aristocrats, diplomats, political organisers, soldiers and journalists experience public events through marriages, rivalries…

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After Dunkirk in Order

by Lee Jackson 10 books 4.4(106,715)

The After Dunkirk series follows the Littlefield family from the evacuation of 1940 through the final campaigns of the Second World War. Separated across occupied France, Britain, North Africa, Italy, Germany and the Pacific, the siblings serve as pilots, soldiers, intelligence officers, codebreakers and resistance operatives while their…

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The Clifton Chronicles in Order

by Jeffrey Archer 7 books 4.3(659,331)

The Clifton Chronicles follow the Clifton and Barrington families from working-class Bristol in the 1920s through the upheavals of the twentieth century. Harry Clifton’s uncertain parentage, education and friendship with Giles Barrington bind him to a shipping dynasty whose wealth is repeatedly threatened by inheritance disputes, wartime loss,…

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Tom Wilde in Order

by Rory Clements 8 books 4.3(42,038)

The Tom Wilde series follows an American-born Cambridge history professor drawn into British and Allied intelligence work from the crises of 1936 through the Second World War and the early Cold War. The novels combine espionage with political extremism, scientific research, royal scandal, propaganda and contested wartime memory.…

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The Moscow Trilogy in Order

by Simon Sebag Montefiore 3 books 4.3(5,681)

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Moscow Trilogy is a loosely connected sequence of historical novels set across revolutionary and Stalinist Russia. Sashenka begins in St Petersburg in 1916 and follows its heroine through revolution and the terror of the 1930s; Red Sky at Noon moves to the Eastern Front in…

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Spy Masters in Order

by Alex Gerlis 4 books 4.3(36,182)

The Spy Masters quartet ranges from D-Day deception and wartime Switzerland to the fall of Vienna and the long shadow of the Cold War. The Best of Our Spies is rooted in Operation Fortitude and occupied France; The Swiss Spy uses neutral Switzerland and the approach to Operation…

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Double Agent Series in Order

by Alex Gerlis 3 books 4.1(5,927)

The Double Agent series follows two intertwined espionage stories from the mid-1930s into the closing months of the Second World War: Charles Cooper, a British writer drawn into Soviet intelligence, and a traitor known as Archie who has penetrated the British establishment. Every Spy a Traitor moves from…

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DCI Frank Merlin in Order

by Mark Ellis 6 books 4.3(12,410)

Mark Ellis’s DCI Frank Merlin novels follow an Anglo-Spanish Scotland Yard detective through wartime London from the Phoney War of 1940 into 1943. The Embassy Murders begins amid uneasy Anglo-American diplomacy; In the Shadows of the Blitz moves into the Battle of Britain and Blitz; The French Spy…

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Standalone books

Standalone books featuring Joseph Stalin (4 books)

Non Fiction

Non Fiction featuring Joseph Stalin (31 books)

Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.