1936–
A popular historian who reconstructed Russia’s tragedies through archives and drama
In 1989 Radzinsky became the first in the USSR to publish Yakov Yurovsky's note and the executioners' testimony, letting them recount the murder of the imperial family second by second.
Edvard Radzinsky is a Russian historian, playwright, and broadcaster who brought the country’s history and tragic figures to a wide audience. Trained at the Moscow Archive Institute, he began in theatre before writing biographies of Nicholas II, Rasputin, Stalin, and other figures. In his 1997 Stalin biography, he used newly accessible records and testimony to argue that Beria may have poisoned Stalin, a claim that remains an interpretation in an unresolved debate rather than established fact. His vivid, psychological histories became widely read, while professional historians criticized aspects of his sourcing and interpretation.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1959Graduated from the Moscow Archive Institute
- 1958–Began as a playwright; his first play, My Dream… India, premiered
- 1960년대–Published plays including 104 Pages About Love
- 1976–Began writing popular histories of Russian historical figures
- 1993Published The Last Tsar
- 1997Published Stalin, raising a death controversy through secret records and testimony
- 1990년대–Hosted the Mysteries of History television series
Related historical events
Playwright on the Soviet Stage: Censorship and the Archival Turn
Before he became known as a historian, Radzinsky came to the stage as a playwright. His first play, My Dream… India, premiered at the Moscow Theatre for Young Spectators in 1958 and closed after fourteen performances, a failure by his own account; its subject, Gerasim Lebedev, the first Russian Indologist, was the same figure as his diploma thesis.
The play that established him was 104 Pages About Love, staged by Anatoly Efros at the Lenin Komsomol Theatre. It was adapted into the popular film Once More About Love, starring Tatyana Doronina and Alexander Lazarev. Other leading directors of the period, among them Georgy Tovstonogov, Andrei Goncharov, Roman Viktyuk and Valery Fokin, staged his work; in the 1990s nine of his plays ran simultaneously on Moscow stages.
This career cannot be separated from censorship. Conversations with Socrates was barred from production for six years and The Theatre of the Times of Nero and Seneca for four. Radzinsky remarked that being staged this way required "the lifespan of a turtle." With the late-1980s thaw he brought his archival training back into theatre. In 1989-1990 he was the first in the USSR to publish Yakov Yurovsky's note on the execution of the imperial family, testimony from participants in the shooting, and a telegram from Yekaterinburg to Lenin about the impending destruction of the family. Joining those testimonies so that the executioners themselves recounted the night second by second became the basis of his play The Last Night of the Last Tsar, directed in the 1990s by Valery Fokin with Mikhail Ulyanov and Yevgeny Mironov among the cast.