In his new book, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Professor Ronald Grigor Suny reconstructs for the first time with new archival sources the first half of Joseph Stalin's life. Unlike some previous biographers of Stalin, Suny places his subject squarely in the turbulent context of Georgian social and political history, the Marxist movement, and the revolutionary underground. He traces how a young and romantic seminary student, fervently Georgian nationalist, a poet and skilled singer, abandoned religion and native country to become a follower of the most radical faction of the revolutionary struggle against autocracy.

Ronald Grigor Suny, the William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, is recognized as a leading expert in Soviet, Armenian, and Georgian history, nationalism and empire studies, and is the author of The Revenge of the Past (1993); The Making of the Georgian Nation (1994); "They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (2015); and with Valerie A. Kivelson, Russia's Empires (2017).

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.