Stalin’s name meant "man of steel" and he lived up to it. He oversaw the war machine that helped defeat Nazism and was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century.

The railway also would have connected northern nickel mines to Soviet factories to the west. But just days after Stalin’s death, in 1953, the project was canceled amid the subsequent “thaw.” ...

In 1938, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin summoned him to Moscow to work as the deputy to the chief of the Soviet secret police (NKVD). Within months the chief had disappeared and Beria had replaced him.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future. However, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and US ...