Product Description

There have been many biographies of Stalin, but the court that surrounded him is untravelled ground. Simon Sebag Montefiore, acclaimed biographer of Catherine the Great's lover, prime minister and general Potemkin, has unearthed the vast underpinning that sustained Stalin. Not only ministers such as Molotov or secret service chiefs such as Beria, but men and women whose loyalty he trusted only until the next purge. 'Spectacular...an impressive and compelling work' Philip Mansel, Spectator 'This magnificent portrait of the dictator' Richard Overy, Literary Review

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5069 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 852 pages

Charles Osborne, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'There is unlikely ever to be a more engrossing account of the life of Joseph Stalin than his huge biography.'

THE EVENING STANDARD
'a marvellously racy, gossipy study, based on immense research.'

DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Simon Sebag Montefiore's writing is caustic and superb and he wears his rigorous scholarship with style.'

Customer Reviews

Stop the world I want to get off

It's a big read. I only wish these long-distance authors would try to remember most of us are just human. We need maps, diagrams, periodic summaries, Who's Who reminders, especially with the russian names. I switched off early and just went with the flow. It's a decent chronology but I found it devoid of any depth of explanation of the politics, the philosophical justification or the emotional detail to make it come to life. The story of course is quite horrific, on a scale that makes you despair. If I had read this when I was fifteen, it would have soured my view of the world and its' 'leaders' for ever. It puts all the dolls house euro bickering that we have to put up with into perspective. Stalin's world with its' crooks and murderous cronies, sycophants and sadists, is all laid out like a circle of hell with every shade of pervert somehow finding his way to the centre of things. Scary that it's so reminiscent of all the other twentieth century egopaths that have got away with it, spreading their culture of terror, carried along on a bloody tide of self rightousness. The world's a dangerous place, ask any historian.

Where was the editor?
This book certainly provides a fascinating insight into some aspects of Stalin's reign but overall I found it very disappointing and in desperate need of a good editor.
The research is certainly there in quantity (in fact it felt at times as though the whole pile had been dumped on my lap to sort out for myself) but it is patchy and the prose is dull and clumsily written. Errors of grammar meant that I frequently found myself re-reading a paragraph to work out what it was saying; we just didn't need all the detail and some of it was very repetitive. Overall it seemed in need of structure.
Of course this book aims to be about Stalin's 'court' but in a book of this length one can reasonably expect a bit of background; it is not an academic history and a little context would have been a tremendous help.
For example, why were there only six pages on his life to the age of about 20? Why did he change his birth date? Where were the two pages we needed on Marxist-Leninist theory and the relationship between Bolshevism and Communism? Why did he so hate Trotsky yet take so long to order his death? Was Trotsky really a threat?
The other wasted opportunity was the absence of any discussion or comparison. The book cries out for a comparison with the French Revolution and Terror or with Fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. What about a chapter telling us what is known about the psychology of people who become torturers and despots?
An interesting book but sadly a missed opportunity.

PAPERBACK BOLSHEVIKS
PAPERBACK BOLSHEVIKS

By IAIN FRASER GRIGOR

IT WAS THE Chinese communist Chou en Lai who, when asked what he thought the enduring lessons of the French Revolution might be, pondered deeply for a long time and then remarked that it was too early to say.

The same observation might well be made with regard to the Russian revolution of 1917, along with the Soviet state and empire which followed it over the next 70-odd years: although it can be said at once that, on the evidence of this and other recent titles in paperback form, there are no positive lessons whatsoever to be drawn from the seven bloody decades of Bolshevik praxis.

That Soviet affairs were for the most of the time bloodily and brutally murderous is, of course, nothing new. Among many other books, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror and Nikolai Tolstoy's Stalin's Secret War told us all about it long ago - Conquest, astonishingly, as far back as 1968, and Tolstoy in 1981.

But since the collapse of the USSR, once-secret archives have opened to researchers: and it is on these that Simon Sebag Montefiore has drawn for his masterly portrait of Stalin's court and courtiers, at work and play.

He has also availed himself of a huge amount of material in the form of the private letters, telegrams, memoranda and diaries of those involved, along with lengthy interviews with family-members of the former Bolshevik aristocracy: the author lists as sources names such as Molotov, Mikoyan, Alliluyeva, Budyonny, Khrushceheva, Litvinova, Malenkov, Ordzhonikidze, Poskrebysheva, Redens, Rykova, Zhdanov and Djugashvili.

At the heart of this aristocracy was, of course, that shining sun of all humanity, Cde. Stalin himself: a fine singer, as dangerous as a tiger politically, a supreme judge of men and their weaknesses, a keen gardener, an elementary teacher (spelling, to Kaganovich), a skilled bank-robber, a man of exceptional literary tastes, a six-times escapee from Tsarist exile, highly intelligent, and a gifted poet and mass-murderer, with whom large numbers of women were - unsurprisingly, perhaps - very keen to sleep.

Montefiore is never less than highly readable as he takes us from Stalin's youth and early years through to his increasing eminence in the later twenties and early thirties (and the starvation, effectively deliberate, of maybe ten million Ukrainian peasants in these same years).

But from the 17th Congress in 1934 (perhaps the last point at which Stalin could have been tumbled within the Party?), things move quickly to the mysterious murder of Kirov and the launching of Terror on an increasingly generalized scale. (Sadly, Montefiore adds nothing to Conquest's story of the anarchist Eisenberg, reportedly sent to a lunatic asylum on account of his abnormal resistance to torture - but of course, this Eisenberg was not of the Soviet aristocracy).

And thus by way of the murderous Thirties, to the Hitler-Stalin Pact (partly at least due to British bumbling): and - soon enough - the fearful (and avoidable) disasters of Barbarossa. The big picture here is well known, though Montefiore adds irresistible detail and colour: "Tukhachevsky's confession, which survives in the archives, is dappled with a brown spray that was found to be blood spattered by a body in motion".

Montefiore's description of Stalin's Kremlin on the eve of German invasion is a tour de force of descriptive writing (though that insane afternoon and evening might even be better suited to the stage). After all, Stalin had known about Hitler's invasion plans for six months: and by the summer of 1941 the early trickle of intelligence evidence had become a flood.

Stalin's failure to prepare defensive measures must be counted one of the really great military blunders of history: a thousand planes destroyed on the ground on the first day of war, and 400,000 men encircled at Minsk by the end of the first week.

Here was another of those very rare chances when Stalin could have been over-thrown by his cabal of guttersnipes: but, once again, they failed the test. Within three weeks of war, the Soviets had lost something around two million men, 3, 500 tanks and maybe 6, 000 war planes.

And yet, at immense cost to the various peoples of the Soviet empire, Germany was to be beaten: and Stalin, sixty-seven years old in 1945 and not far from the terminal near-madness of his last years, could consolidate his power once more, and prepare for another series of phantasmagoric purges.

But in these few short years before his death, Stalin could still outwit his Western Alllies at the Great Power conferences, acquire The Bomb by 1949, and enclose his new east European empire within the walls of the Iron Curtain.

Montefiore's book is enormously readable and could easily be twice as long as it is: in places, indeed, such as with his coverage of the Doctors' Plot, it might be thought a little skimped, for the reader, astonishingly, wants more detail rather than less. He deftly avoids the danger of hagiography (and for a man as politically talented as Stalin, that must always be a danger, in any account that looks for balance and insight).

Montefiore's command of telling detail and narrative drive is compelling. He does not unduly trouble his readers with some of the big why's and what-if's of Stalinism: among them, why didn't the party ditch Stalin, as it might have done, at the 1934 Congress?

What if Stalin had pre-emptively attacked Germany in 1940 or early 1941, or had at least foreseen the German attack in the summer of that year; and what if he had not destroyed the best of party and army and not surrounded himself with a revolving circus of murderous and extremely talented scum (of whom Comrade Stalin was just a little more than primus inter pares)? But not till the post-war period, however, were there signs that some of the top leadership might contemplate a coup.

The Court of the Red Tsar is hugely ambitious and impeccably turned, beautifully paced and organized. No précis can begin to do it justice, and it certainly deserves the prizes it has won. No less an authority that Henry Kissinger has let it be known of the book that, `I did not think I could learn anything new about Stalin but I was wrong'.

And by one leading 20th century war-criminal on another, that is high praise indeed.