Edvard Radzinsky

Edvard Stanislavovich Radzinsky (born September 23, 1936) is a Russian playwright, television personality, screenwriter, and the author of more than forty popular history books. He was born in Moscow, Russia, on September 23, 1936, to playwright Stanislav Radzinsky and his wife, Sofia. He studied at the Moscow Archive Institute and is a trained historian.

In 1955 Radzinsky married actress Alla Geraskina, the daughter of popular Soviet playwright and writer Lia Geraskina. Their son Oleg was born in 1958. Radzinsky divorced Alla in 1964. He later married Tatiana Doronina, one of the leading Soviet actresses of the 60s-70s. They divorced later. He is married to actress Elena Denisova.

Radzinsky became a writer of popular non-fiction books on historical subjects, publishing more than forty. He has specialized in books about figures and times in Russian history. Since the 1990s, he has written the series Mysteries of History. Books translated into English include his biographies of Tsars Nicholas II and Alexander II, Rasputin, and Joseph Stalin.

His book Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives (1997) was based on research in Russian and Soviet archives made newly available after 1991. He explored numerous controversies about Joseph Stalin, including the existence of a fuller text of Lenin's Testament, the alleged involvement of Stalin as an agent of the Tsarist secret police, and the role of Stalin in the death of his wife and the murder of Sergey Kirov.

According to Radzinsky, Stalin may have been poisoned by the order of Lavrentiy Beria. His book includes an interview with a former bodyguard of Stalin, who stated that on the night of Stalin's death, the bodyguards were relieved of duty by an NKVD officer named Khrustalev. This same officer was briefly mentioned in Memories, the memoir of Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.

Radzinsky drew on documents from the archives to support the hypothesis by historian Viktor Suvorov that Stalin had prepared plans for a preemptive strike against Nazi Germany in 1941. As is known, Germany invaded the Soviet Union first.