The Best TIME Covers

On TIME's 85th anniversary, check out the most lasting images ever to appear inside the red border and vote for the best cover in TIME history.

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Joseph Stalin
Man of the Year
January 1, 1940

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Cover Story Excerpt:
On the year's shortest day, 60 years ago, in Gori, near Tiflis, a son was born to a poor, hard-working Georgian cobbler named Vissarion Djugashvili. The boy's pious mother christened him Joseph, after the husband of Mary, mother of Jesus. But names were not to stick very long to this newest subject of the Tsar; he was to answer to Soso, Koba, David, Nijeradze, Chijikov and Ivanovich until at length he acquired the pseudonym of Stalin, Man of Steel....Read the full story

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