The Dancer and the Devil: Stalin, Pavlova, and the Road to the Great Pandemic

“God is on your side? Is he a conservative? The Devil is on my side, he's a good communist.”-Joseph Stalin

In the wee hours of January 23, 1931, the world's greatest ballerina lay dying. As her lungs filled with fluid, the exiled Russian, Anna Pavlova, gasped to doctors that she had been “poisoned” by food in Paris, but to no avail. To a watching world, she symbolized the glories of pre-Soviet Russia. And for that, she had to die.

Joseph Stalin, chief murderer and dictator of the USSR, devise...