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This widely acclaimed biography of Stalin and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of Stalin as Soviet dictator, Marxist leader, and Russian tsar.
Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life and murderous cruelty of this secret world. Written with bracing narrative verve, this feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing. Showing how Stalin's triumphs and crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism and his gifted but flawed character, this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated and human as he was brutal and chilling.
- Sales Rank: #55542 in Books
- Brand: Montefiore, Simon Sebag
- Published on: 2005-09-13
- Released on: 2005-09-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.70" w x 5.20" l, 1.81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 848 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Montefiore (The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin) is more interested in life at the top than at the bottom, so he includes hundreds of pages on Stalin's purges of top Communists, while devoting much less space to the forced collectivization of Soviet peasants that led to millions of deaths. In lively prose, he intersperses his mammoth account of Stalin's often-deadly political decisions with the personal lives of the Soviet dictator and those around him. As a result, the reader learns about sexual peccadilloes of the top Communists: Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, for one, "craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players." Stalin's own escapades after the death of his wife are also noted. There's also much detail about the food at parties and other meetings of Stalin's henchmen. The effect is paradoxical: Stalin and his cronies are humanized at the same time as their cruel misdeeds are recounted. Montefiore offers little help in answering some of the unsettled questions surrounding Stalin: how involved was he in the 1934 murder of rising official Sergei Kirov, for example. He also seems to leave open the question of Stalin's paranoia: he argues that the Georgian-born ruler was a charming man who used his people skills to get whatever he wanted. Montefiore mainly skirts the paranoia issue, noting that only after WWII, when Stalin launched his anti-Semitic campaigns, did he "become a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite." There are many Stalin biographies out there, but this fascinating work distinguishes itself by its extensive use of fresh archival material and its focus on Stalin's ever-changing coterie. Maps and 24 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Any biography of a tyrant runs the risk of humanizing its subject to the point of appearing to mitigate his crimes. But Montefiore's intimate portrait actually throws the coldhearted murderousness with which Stalin pursued and defended power into sharper relief. The book—much of it based on fresh archival material—moves smoothly between detailed sketches of everyday life at the Kremlin and accounts of the paranoid and sanguinary scheming that determined Soviet politics. This juxtaposition captures the vertiginous quality of life in Stalin's court, where no allegiance was permanent. Just as strikingly, Montefiore shows how Stalin, a "master of friendships," used charm to win the support of members of the Party's inner circle (many of whom ended up regretting it). This haunting book gets us as close as we are likely to come to the man who believed that "the solution to every human problem was death."
Copyright � 2005 The New Yorker
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Because of its extraordinary detail, this portrait of Joseph Stalin is as realistic as is currently historically possible. Relying on Stalin's personal correspondence with his family and his "magnates," as Montefiore terms the dictator's lieutenants, the author liberally quotes letters, memoirs, and interviews he conducted with survivors in his book chronicling the years 1929-53. Through vignettes of a typical vacation, night at the Kremlin office, or drunken party at the dacha, the author evokes the atmosphere of Stalin's entourage. Stalin could be charming, Montefiore reports. Magnates and their wives bantered with the leader; lesser lieges wisely aped his pronouncements. But beneath the bonhomie was a substrate of mortal danger. Montefiore emphasizes Stalin's feral suspiciousness throughout, his feigned modesty masking his megalomania, his patience in exacting sadistic revenge. Those traits are exhibited in the fatal fallout from this work's opening scene, the 1932 suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadya, and then metastasize in descriptions of Stalin's conspiratorial milestones, from the likely arranged 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov to the Doctor's Plot of 1953. By illustrating how Stalin acted in private, Montefiore has produced a landmark work that rounds out political biographies of the tyrant. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
209 of 224 people found the following review helpful.
Extraordinary Examination of the Banality of Evil
By Lonya
Hannah Arendt, in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem, coined the phrase `banality of evil' to describe the rather bland existence of those who, like Eichman, were capable of committing unpardonable acts of unspeakable bestiality. Simon Sebag Montefiore's elegantly written Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar (Red Tsar) mines this same vein in his examination of the life of Stalin and his inner circle. Red Tsar provides the reader with an inside, almost voyeuristic, view of the life of Stalin and his circle from his accession to power after the death of Lenin until his own death in 1953. Montefiore does a masterful job of setting out the personal lives and inner workings of Stalin and his court against the backdrop of the extraordinary historic events that wracked the USSR during those times. During Stalin's rein the Ukraine was wracked by forced starvation in the Ukraine and rural masses were brutally killed and/or exiled in the anti-kulak campaign. Through show trials and purges and through a war on the eastern front that will probably never be matched for horror and brutality, Stalin and his courtiers lived lives of bourgeois expectations and affectation that would be recognizable if they were played out in Moscow, Idaho and not the USSR.
Red Tsar has been meticulously researched. Montefiore has done a marvelous job of examining newly opened Russian archives. He interviewed a large number of surviving family members of the inner circle and was provided access to diaries, memoirs, and personal correspondence that has not been seen by historians prior to this work. The end notes can be a bit confusing but it's clear that Montefiore's factual observations and his evaluations of those observations are grounded deeply in thorough research.
Red Tsar begins with the death, apparently by suicide, of Stalin's second wife, Nadya. Despite rumors that Stalin killed his wife Montefiore makes clear the emotional devastation visited upon Stalin as the result of her death and gives little credence to the rumor. The death of Nadya takes pride of place in Red Tsar because it is Montefiore's opinion that the emotional blow was the turning point at which Stalin began the transformation that would take him from strong ruler to brutal tyrant.
From this point Montefiore takes us back and examines the process by which Stalin acquired absolute power. Montefiore makes it clear that, contrary to popular belief, it took Stalin years to acquire the power that has since become enshrined in myth. He did not just intimidate people, he cajoled, he charmed, and he compromised. Even as late as the mid-1930's there were more than a few instances where Stalin did not quite get his way. Unfortunately, Stalin had a prodigious memory for slights and obstacles along his path to power. Stalin was, if nothing else, capable of long term thinking and he did not need instant gratification when it came to evening the score.
Montefiore does an incredible job of humanizing Stalin without once belittling the horrors that were committed in his name. Montefiore does not excuse Stalin by dispelling the myth that his life involved nothing more than engaging in evil acts. Rather, his fleshing out the person that was Stalin, highly literate, smart, often engaging and charming, devoted to his daughter points out the duality from which banality can give birth to evil. Further, this work is not simply an overview of Stalin's personal life. It is an overview of Stalin's court, Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, Krushchev, Yezhov (NKVD boss before Beria), and Zhdanov and their families. They all lived in the same apartment complexes in or near the Kremlin. They were friends as well as rivals and their wives and children mingled freely with each other and even with Stalin.
Stalin's interest in literature and the arts is also examined closely. Stalin had a strong interest in the arts and considered himself the ultimate arbiter. He was instrumental in having Gorky return to the USSR where he was treated as a returning hero. He peered over, edited, praised, or criticized the works of Babel, Akhmatova, Eisenstein, and Shostakovich. He was, perhaps, a dilettante, but a dilettante with the power of life and death.
Last, two portions of the book are particularly compelling. The first takes place in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of the USSR in June, 1941. Totally despondent over the overwhelming early losses suffered by a military criminally weakened by purges and aware that Hitler had completely outfoxed him. He took to his rooms and would not come out. Finally, when his court finally saw fit to intrude on Stalin's isolation Stalin quivered and asked if they had come to arrest or execute him. Equally compelling is the story of Stalin's long medical decline and the horrible events surrounding his lingering death.
One caveat for readers new to Soviet history. Montefiore's treatment focuses on the inner workings of Stalin and his court. He describes the historic events that take place outside the court in a manner that assumes a certain baseline familiarity with those events. As good as this book is, the reader new to Soviet history might be well served to start off with a general history before delving into Red Tsar. Having said that, Court of the Red Tsar is a wonderful treatment of the inner works of life under Stalin. It should be read and savored.
68 of 72 people found the following review helpful.
Horrifyingly Fascinating Account of Stalin
By A Customer
I must admit that I feel a bit of guilt for the compulsive manner in which I read this highly personal account of life in the court of Stalin. This well-told story is horrible, but fascinating.
Montefiore makes no effort to dissect the big geopolitical issues of the Stalin era, except to use them as a backdrop to the backstabbing, denunciations, groveling, and horror in which the senior leadership of the Soviet Union operated from the early 30s until the early 50s. Using in-depth interviews and newly-available archival information, including much of the correspondence between and among the senior leadership, Montefiore fleshes out what was going on under the surface, in particular the complex love-hate (mostly hate) relationship of Stalin to his court.
It's a wonderful account of a country run by leaders who viewed their role more as mafiosi than as leaders of a legitimate government. In a real sense, they were gangsters and that's the way they ran the country--including the way Stalin required the leadership to all participate in the Great Terror (he wanted all them to have blood on their hands and thus share in the collective guilt).
The author's behind-the-scenes view of the Great Terror is the centerpiece of the book. His portraits of Yeshov and Beria, the two most malignant monsters after Stalin, will now be etched into my memory.
But in the end, the book is a portrait of Stalin, a man who could turn on the charm, perform an act of kindness for an old comrade, then in the next moment sign the death warrants of hundreds of innocent victims. I disagree with other reviewers who criticize the author for treating Stalin too kindly. There's no question where Montefiore stands: he views Stalin was a monster, and Stalin's occasional human touches makes him even more so.
I've had long-term interest in 20th century Russian history, particularly trying to understand how a country could find itself in the hands of the personification of evil. This book helps answer the question.
A final point. Montefiore is an excellent story teller. I don't pretend to be in position to judge all his conclusions, but they have the ring of truth to them, and the author is good about telling the reader when he's departed from evidence into speculation.
I recommend this book. I only wish that in reading it, I lacked the guilty fascination that comes from watching an entire nation turned into a train wreck by a single evil man.
88 of 96 people found the following review helpful.
Inside Stalin
By Newton Munnow
Any historical figure who has earned the suffix of an '-ism' has, most likely, long been shrouded in myth. Sebag Montefiore has dug deep into the archives and found an astounding amount of new material to chart the inner circle of Stalin's court, bringing the man out of the shadows and into the third dimension. You may well wish he'd stayed in the dark. STALIN makes for fascinating and often brutal reading. Most extraordinary is just what a closed and cosy court Stalin reigned over. Sebag Montefiore manages to recreate the lethal and intimate atmosphere that all who chose to be close to him were forced to endure. Most interesting are the early days, long before corruption had penetrated the Politburo. Here, the author uncovers the highest ranking officials taking trams to work, and Stalin's own wife begging 50 roubles off her husband for children's clothes. The descent soon begins, and Sebag Montefiore follows its course in excerpts from Stalin's own archives and interviews too numerous to mention. Every now and then, there is the tiniest slip. In one sentence, an official is described as both bald and red headed, but that is pure pedantry. It's hard to imagine a more fascinating biography hitting the shelves this year. Be warned, it's a 600 page hernia of a tome, but take comfort in the author's ability to keep the pages turning.
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