History illuminates the present. I’ve been reading Stephen Kotkin’s widely and justly praised multivolume biography of Josef Stalin and have encountered many passages that illuminate the present.

I learned, for example, that Stalin met the exiled Vladimir Lenin more than a decade before the October 1917 revolution, and that by the early 1920s until his death in 1924, Lenin was in failing health, confined to an estate with “a staff, including the worker-cook Spiridon Putin,” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grandfather.