Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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102 of 108 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary Examination of the Banality of Evil, August 22, 2004
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 Stalin 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.
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56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inside Stalin, April 16, 2004
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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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This charming tyrant and mass murderer, April 13, 2004
The dictator was an autodidact who read exhaustively, while envious of his more intellectual colleagues. He liked Steinbeck and Galsworthy and he admired Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable films. Surprisingly, he had a good singing voice while less surprisingly he had "a hangman's wit." Although he became the unrivaled leader by 1929, well into the thirties he had to show respect, deference and charm to his fellow Politburo members. During the years of collectivization he frequently had to write letters of apology to the leading party members whose sensitivities had been bruised. At the same time he could write to one colleague "I could cover you with kisses in gratitude for your actions down there." The atmosphere in the early thirties was rather different from what one would think. The elite lived comfortably but not (yet) luxuriously and they would still have problems with money. Many of the children remember the dictator's fondness towards them. The elite would go into each others apartments to talk, to chat, to ask if they had extra food or sugar. The dictator himself had only one or two bodyguards until the assassination of Kirov...Welcome to Simon Sebag Montefiore's history of Stalin and his inner circle. As a work of history it is based on the most extensive archival research yet, the most recent scholarly research as well as intensive interviews with the survivors of the elite and their families. The result is a fascinating, disturbing work that details the life of Stalin and incidentally of the country that he ran. We read such tense passages such as the Revolution Day parade in 1941 held while the Germans were only fifty miles away. The work is full of interesting facts. The secret policeman Yagoda had a 165 pornographic pipes and cigarette holders while his successor Beria had eleven satin teddy bears (presumably because twelve would be just too much). We get to see a picture of a shirtless Molotov (of all people) playing tennis (of all things). In one of the very few good things one can say about him, Molotov still laid a place at the table for his arrested and imprisoned wife. (They were eventually reunited, unlike millions of other Soviets). Stalin's daughter apparently had a serious crush on Beria's son. Babel, Sholokhov and Yezhov all slept with the same woman (Yezhov's wife). Stalin was shocked at the fall of France: "Couldn't they put up any resistance at all? Now Hitler's going to beat our brains in!" He also described Hiroshima as "super-barbaric." More to the point Montefiore discusses Stalin's personal life. His wife almost certainly did commit suicide (and was not murdered as others suggested). Montefiore points out that she appeared to have been genuinely manic-depressive. Being married to Stalin obviously didn't help this, but it didn't cause it either. Montefiore leans against the idea that Kirov was murdered on Stalin's order. Like the burning of the Reichstag and the assassination of John F. Kennedy this probably was the act of a single individual. Maxim Gorky's death was probably the result of natural causes. As Montefiore goes on he points out that the purges was not just the result of one's man evil (his colleagues and lower level bureaucrats eagerly participated and made their own lists.) Oddly enough, the doctor's plot, the sinister anti-Semitic "conspiracy" that was apparently supposed to launch Stalin's final purge, had a basis in fact: apparently Zhdanov's doctors had hastened his death by incompetence. We learn more about Beria; on the one hand he was a sadistic torturer, a man who murdered and poisoned with his bare hands, a vile rapist. But on the other hand he was an effective bureaucrat, married to a beautiful woman who was loyal to him to the end of her days, and was surprisingly liberal. And so we read about how Stalin moved from the purges through the war to the cold war and became an absolute dictator. And so we read how no-one was safe: Molotov's wife, Kaganovich's brother, Kalinin's wife, Mikoyan's son, Khruschev's daughter in law and several of Stalin's own-in-laws all faced imprisonment or death. As the book goes on some weaknesses become clearer. The notes are somewhat awkward and it is not always clear which fact refers to which source. There are certain slips such as when Montefiore writes that Jews did not make up 6% of the party but were a majority of the government (which was what exactly?) At one time Montefiore says that Stalin was "more paranoid and more confident" which does not exactly explain things. More and more there is emphasis on the striking detail and the horrific anecdote, as opposed to sustained analysis. And so we get two pages on how Stalin went about getting a new national anthem, five pages on his first meeting with Churchill, two and a half pages on his daughter's relationship with a much older man. But the battle of Kursk only gets a paragraph, and it is not clear how the Soviet Union survived to stop Hitler. There is little on economic planning, while nationalities policy is only discussed when deportations come up. By the postwar years the narrative is the grim, familiar horrific account of endless, bullying banquets with Stalin's colleagues in deadly fear for their lives, and Soviet history is too much reduced to Stalin's whims (this particularly weakens his discussion of the cold war). But overall this is an important book that tells us much that we didn't know about the man whose victims ran into the eight digits.
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