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. Biography. Edvard Stanislavovich Radzinsky was born in Moscow, Russia on September 23, 1936 to playwright Stanislav Radzinsky and his wife Sofia. He studied in the Moscow Archive Institute and is a trained historian. In 1955 Radzinsky married actress Alla Geraskina, a 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. Career. 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 of 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 "" (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 was poisoned by 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.