His paternal grandmother was from Bessarabia. Since the 1990s, he has written the series Mysteries of History. Thebooks translated to English include his biographies of Tsars Nicholas Il and Alexander II, Rasputin, and Joseph Stalin. His book Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives discusses a number of well known contro- versies about Joseph Stalin, including the existence of a fuller text of Lenin's Testa- ment, 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 Radzinskiy, Stalin was poisoned by order of Lavrentiy Beria. The play "The Last Night of the Last Tsar" is based on research conducted by Edvard Radzinskiy for two decades while preparing his book "The Life and Death of Nicholas I". nI 1989-1990, for the first time in the USSR, Radzinskiy published a note by Yurovsky about the execution of the royal family, as well as the testimony of some of the participants in the execution and a telegram to Lenin from Yekaterinburg about the impending destruction of the royal family. Combining the testimony of the par- ticipants in the execution of the royal family, Radzinskiy, without actually inserting a word, forced these participants themselves to tell ni seconds about the regicide. Director Valery Fokin staged the play in the 1990s.