Those Who Worked for Stalin

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Joshua Rubenstein, All the Dictator’s Men. Stalin targeted the relatives, assistants and friends of his inner circle. Yet his lieutenants kept the Soviet state together after his death. Wall Street Journal, Dec 21, 2015.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-dictators-men-1450645690
(book review on Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team; The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics. Princeton University Press, 2015)

Note:
(a) The review title is a wordplay on All the King's Men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_King%27s_Men

(b) "Stalin suffered a stroke on March 1, 1953 * * * Dwight Eisenhower had been inaugurated seven weeks earlier after a campaign in which he and his foreign-policy adviser John Foster Dulles [1888 – 1959; Secretary of State 1853 -1959; died of colon cancer]"
(i) Joseph Stalin (1878 - Mar 5, 1953; birth surname: Jughashvili; Sometime between 1910 and 1912, he began using the alias 'Stalin' in his writings)
(ii) Russian noun feminine "stal" and German noun masculine Stahl both means "steel." (The first letter of a German noun must be capitalized.)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Stalin

(c) "Lazar Kaganovich's elder brother, the minister of aviation at a time when the aviation industry was coming under fire for 'poor performance,' was mocked by Stalin and told that the security police were preparing to charge him with being 'a wrecker and a German spy.' He committed suicide in 1941; Lazar Kaganovich never tried to intervene on his brother’s behalf."

Lazar Kaganovich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazar_Kaganovich
(1893 – 1991; People's Commissar for Transport 1938 – 1942; Lazar's brother, Mikhail Kaganovich, who was people's commisar of the Aviation Industry," committed suicide in 1941)
(d) "Molotov, the longtime foreign minister, was humiliated on several occasions. He had to accept the arrest of assistants, even the exile of his beloved (Jewish) wife in January 1949, and he was of course not allowed to object when Stalin insisted that he and his wife divorce."

Vyacheslav Molotov (1890 – 1986; foreign minister 1953-1956, 1939-1949; his wife was Polina Zhemchuzhina, who reunited with  Molotov right after the death of Stalin)  Wikipedia

(e) "And Stalin did not spare his own relatives. After his wife committed suicide in 1932, he gradually targeted a large group of her family members. 'The casualty rate in Stalin's own family and intimate circle during the Great Purges [was] as high or higher than that of other team members,' Ms Fitzpatrick writes."  (brackets original)
(i) Nadezhda Alliluyeva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadezhda_Alliluyeva
(the second wife of Stalin; at 18 married 41-year-old Stalin)
(ii) Great Purge (1936 - 1938)
(iii) Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)