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4.0 out of 5 stars
Six hundred pages of Solitude., January 22, 2006
This review is from: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Paperback)
On March,9 1953 Stalin's funerals announced the closing of an era.
Molotov, Krushev and Beria pronounced the official speeches praising the virtues of the father of Nationalities.
It was a great show of unity and official harmony from the workers' paradise, but reality was different from the official show.
Stalin had died a lonely man and his heirs had been in the past months a miserable lot of frightened men.
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Polina, Molotov's wife, was still in the Lubianka, under interrogation, while her husband had been on the verge to be purged under Stalin's malevolent and dangerous suspicions.
Beria had been in disgrace as well and extremely worried for his fate, and life (there is still a lingering suspect he had poisoned Stalin to prevent being outmanoeuvred). Still - relieved as he could be by Stalin's death, he did not know that in a few months he would have been nonetheless eliminated, being too compromised with the past.
Krushev had been at times protégé and outcast, but his ability to shade his real feelings and his apparent candidness had saved him more than once from Stalin's congenital distrust.
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Molotov, Krushev and Beria represented the last "court of the Red Tsar".
They were survivors in an entourage repeatedly decimated by bloody purges that followed - one after the other - since 1937.
And they were collectively responsible for atrocities unparalleled but for those of Nazi Germany, and eager - each one separately - to shove off the burden of responsibility on the dead despot.
There was no Nuremberg trial for the "murderous magnates".
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This essay is both a biography of the red tsar and the story of his courtiers.
History of Soviet Russia - unlike that of Nazi Germany - is still too open to disputes to present a common ground of evaluation.
Many disagreements rise from lack of first hand reliable sources and the persistence both of Soviet mythology and visceral anti-communist hatred.
This is one of the reasons we must be obliged to Simon Sebag Montefiore: he has done an excellent work of research, having had the opportunity to scrutinize declassified official documents of the era and to interview survivors and descendants of the family elites of Stalin's inner circle, an enormous amount of work that inevitably cost the author a good deal of time.
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"Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar" is a well written and interesting work.
Sebag Montefiore casts new light on Stalin portrait, sometimes in unexpected directions.
He is one of the few historians to document the dictator refined intellectual curiosity, spanning from politics to poetry and literature (he even attempted translation of Georgian epics).
Stalin was not the brute we've been accustomed from the "revisionist" studies produced by historians like Helene Carrere d'Encausse (in her "Lénine" he is liquidated as little more than a loutish bank robber) and neither the dim-witted monster imagined by most writers (last a popular writer as Robert Harris in his - rather deluding - "Archangel").
He was an avid reader, did show exceptional abilities to express complex ideas in clear and concise language, and revealed above average managerial skills.
These features help to explain both his rise to power and the ability to maintain it.
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Stalin was also a ruthless, paranoid and resentful dictator.
He was a committed politician and a fanatic Bolshevik, persuaded that ends are always superior to mean, no matter personal and collective sacrifices.
These qualities were to become his blessings and damnation: the curse of tyrants, who after killing all the dissenters, end up lonely prisoners in the golden cage of sycophantic courtiers.
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The pervading biographical dimension of this essay represents the main limit of this work, that cannot attain a higher level of historiography.
Montefiore produced an extremely informed work, but critical evaluation of the historical events is reduced to the bone.
Moreover psychology is most of the times massively used to explain historical events, to detriment to other reasons.
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These features are especially visible in the description of Stalin's rise to power: from revolutionary agitator, to leader of a Bolshevik oligarchy, ending as sole ruler of an immense empire.
There are but confusing explanations on how he was able to attain such place: nothing is said about the role of the new burocracy in normalizing the revolution and supporting stronger and less idealistic leaders, the role of terror and propaganda in cementing the new Soviet State.
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Some parts of Stalin's biography are completely neglected: the formative years as a pre-revolutionary leader (not just his intellectual milieu, but his travels and his contacts with the European intelligentsia) and the first years of the revolution.
Few words are spent for the "foreign" court of the red tsar: all those intellectuals and political leaders who at different times made part of his entourage and from time to time represented the revolution abroad.
The list could be longer...
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Unsatisfactory is also the cursory censure of Stalinism, mostly based on an honest and void indignation for all the suffering it caused.
The mission of history is to understand AND remember.
To paraphrase George Santayana, those who cannot understand the past are liable to repeat former errors.
The recurrent famines and the frightening purges can be described but most important is to understand why they came to happen and their inner reasons outside insanity.
And yet this was the best place to debate heated arguments as the essence of totalitarian power, the reasons of emergency and survival of the revolution, the claim of humanity in an age of extremes.
Did Stalin and his elite chose the lesser evil, as Bolsheviks still claim to day?
Was the emergency a sufficient reason for the pains caused?
Did they really believe in the final outcome of the communist Struggle?
Or they were just a new oligarchy interested in self preservation?
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The mention of Stalin's intellectual curiosity could also give room for further analysis.
Stalin's fascination for the French Terror and Robespierre confronts two different totalitarian experiences and their final different outcome: if the French terror ended cannibalizing itself, the Russian terror ended up in strengthening the Bolshevik grip to power.
Stalin's compulsive passion for biographies of Eastern rulers offers an insight into the idea of autocratic power he tried to found: Eastern despotism - hardly camouflaged in a new Marxist fashion - as opposed to Western liberalism, but also deeply ingrained in the millennial autocratic culture coming down from Byzantium.
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Finally a wider historical perspective could made the readers understand that Stalin was not unique in the panorama of the 1930s: Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, Hitler in Germany, but also smaller dictators all over Europe (Austria, Turkey, Romania,...).
History should try to explain if all these despotic regimes were an isolate and peculiar feature of the era - and if so, the causes and affinities between the many different totalitarian regimes - or if Stalin was different - and given the right humus, a Stalinist regime could be resuscitated today (the only reference I found is a rather dull remark of the resemblance between Stalin and Saddam Hussein at page 21).
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My field of interest is more oriented to ancient and modern history. I'm not a great fan of contemporary history but for restricted specific periods: one of these is the 1930s in Europe and America.
If you kept reading to these last lines, there is a chance you may be interested in other works I had the chance to read about the same topic:
- "The Dark Valley. A Panorama of the 1930s" by Piers Brendon. Monumental history of the 1930s written with gusto and insight. It is a work of easy readability, with journalistic spirit but great accuracy.
- "Age of Extremes - The Short XXth Century" by E.J. Hobsbawn (1994). Hugely interesting, with a deliberate Marxist perspective. I loved this book, because it is a great fresco of the period from 1914 to 1991 and a passionate attempt not to justify, but to understand the inner mechanism of history.
- "Lenine" by Helene Carrere d'Encausse. No biography of Lenin cannot but deal with Stalin as well. The writer is supposed to be an expert of Russian history, but the disgust she shows, is inevitably disqualifying for her work.
- "The Banality of Evil. Heichmann in Jerusalem" by Hannah Harendt. Hannah Harendt has been one of the sharpest political and philosophical minds of the XX century: this is the report of Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, but her reflection on duty and responsibility are well fit to be used in judging Stalinism.
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You are most welcome if you can suggest other books about the same theme or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.
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