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Stalin

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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.

This is the definitive biography of Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili (Stalin) and his evil dictatorship. From his birth in 1878 through his rise to power in the 1920's, the "Great Terror" of the late 1930's, the conflict of World War II, the horrific post-war period to his death in 1953, Stalin's evil nature is documented in terrifying detail. Fascinating!

I have a fascination with accounts about the life and deeds of autocratic rulers: I guess it's because I am a fair minded person and I never fail to be APPALLED at the unjustice and arbitrariness of their oppressive and persecutory policies (which is why I have read Mao's biography. Pol Pot is next!). Montefiore does an outstanding job in introducing us to the main players in this gigantic drama: the reader truly feels like being present at the meetings, decisions making sessions and leisurely times of the monsters who ruled over millions. Towards the end of the book Stalin fades in the background as other figures acquire more power and emerge as the future rulers of the USSR. I have no major critique of the book: I just thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone who wants to read an eminently readable account of Stalin and the USSR. The reader will learn at the end of the book that people like Molotov and his wife remained fervent Stalinists until their deaths. If that is not a glaring example of Stockholm Syndrome, I do not know what is...

This book is not a complete biography of Stalin: rather its subject is just what its subtitle says it is, the court of the Red Tsar. Naturally, the period of Stalin's having a court covers the most important part of his life.

The author spent years gathering documents and remembrances from survivors in Russia. As well, he had unprecedented access to the Stalin archives. His patient collection of new information shows in the book's many fascinating anecdotes, ranging from bizarre to horrifying.

For those familiar with the career of Stalin, the book has no great shocking revelations. Rather it is in its anecdotes we gain grim new details of this almost unprecedented tyranny. The contrast in court life before the first great terror, 1937, and after; Stalin's intense interference with the personal lives of his colleagues, whom the author nicely terms the magnates; Stalin's endless lists of names carefully checked off; certain glimpses of Stalin's wartime behaviour; and details of Stalin's death - all these and more are new stories and add detail and nuance to our understanding of one of history's greatest monsters.

Stalin, by the reckoning given here, was the second greatest mass-murderer in human history, surpassed only in the sheer volume of victims by Chairman Mao, but such counts are never accurate even with good archives because so many of the events in those horrifying regimes were disguised or unreported.

When Stalin wanted a prominent person killed, often the act was disguised as something like an automobile accident. Beria, one of his chief killers, sometimes employed poisons, reminding one of a prince in the court of the Borgias, and he may have done so in the end with the Vozhd himself as Stalin became obviously senile and busied himself with still new terrors in the early 1950s, ones aimed at doctors, Jews, and Mingrelian speakers from Georgia - the last including Beria himself. All of the magnates in the last days feared another great wave of murder and torture, as they also feared Stalin's failing mind carelessly risking war with the West.

Stalin believed the government needed regular shaking up. In that he reminds me of Thomas Jefferson's belief that the tree of liberty needed new blood every fifteen or twenty years. Stalin also, I believe, simply tired of some of the people with whom he worked for any time. He had such a severe set of standards of behaviour and performance - Stalin was a workaholic - that he grew tired of magnates who, with success, assumed manners that suggested being at odds with his deeply rooted concepts of Bolshevik standards. Above all, Stalin was paranoid about anyone who doubted him or anyone who might challenge him, and his extraordinary ability to read human beings made it close to impossible for anyone to hide their doubts. His relentless intelligence apparatus also fed his doubts or fears about people. Everyone of consequence was bugged, and it only took one casual suggestive remark at home to start Stalin's thinking about the end of someone's usefulness.

Stalin's human-intelligence operation abroad might well have been the greatest ever assembled (it included Kim Philby and the other Cambridge spies in Britain, Richard Sorge in Japan, someone unknown high in the German government, and important people in America's Manhattan Project) and it provided him with many important tips, but Stalin's paranoia often caused him to reject the information in a bizarre twist on the Cassandra legend.

Stalin certainly suffered from some form of mental illness: his extreme paranoia alone attests to that. He was also a true psychopath, able to charm and disarm people even while planning to kill them. Stalin had a stare, with yellowy unblinking eyes, that he used often to question or discomfort or threaten people, sometimes terrifying those he was about to destroy. He enjoyed, like a cat with a captured mouse, toying with his victims. It was a significant sport for him during his campaigns against magnates or officials. His sense of humor was crude, and he enjoyed throwing bits of orange peel or wine corks at his dinner guests. He sometimes greeted officials or friends with questions like "haven't they arrested you yet?" But, as Montefiore tells us, he was exceptionally intelligent and, like Hitler, he had a prodigious memory.

But of course, most of his killing was not competitors, their families, authors or artists who displeased him, but millions of ordinary people: the millions of kulaks (successful farmers, the beginnings of a Russian middle class) he arrested and tortured and killed, the millions of Ukrainians whom he deliberately consigned to starvation (on the order of 10 to 12 million), and various other national groups from Poles to Germans who were killed by the hundreds of thousands. Stalin had a godlike stance towards the suffering and deaths of millions of victims: what happened was simply necessary, like a gardener pulling weeds, in working towards the ideals of Bolshevism.

I believe the author has straightened out the conflicting tales of Stalin's behaviour in the first days of Hitler's invasion. There have been many conflicting stories in reputable books about whether Stalin crumpled into a useless drunken heap or kept his steely grip.
The author has given us more information about Stalin's death, but the picture remains unclear in some details. Here again, reputable books have contained conflicting stories.

Rich with new information, the book is not without faults. Indeed, it has several significant ones.

The index, I realize in writing this review, is seriously inadequate to the size and complexity of the book's subject matter. I recall specific events or descriptions, but when I try finding them in the index by several possible routes, there are no adequate references.

The book has an episodic nature in which years at a time on some subjects disappear. There is also the sometimes annoying practice of a very brief fact tacked on to a passage, almost a non sequitur, I assume just to employ material people had supplied the author.

The writing varies between quite good and not so good. For example, Riumin, one of his last killers, is described at the start of Chapter 56 as "...plump and balding, stupid and vicious...." Yet in the same paragraph, Riumin is said to have completed a good education (for that day) and qualified as an accountant, hardly the achievement of a stupid person, especially in those days of much more stringent school requirements. This kind of thing is fairly common through the book, and it is annoying, being the result I suggest of the author's readiness to dash off colorful descriptions of new characters which later prove less than accurate as their tales are told.

Despite its shortcomings, the book is an indispensable source for students of the Soviet Union, Stalin, tyranny, modern European history, and psychology.

Excellent. Extremely well-researched, extremely well-written. If you read ONLY ONE book on Joe Stalin, this should be IT. It is no accident that John LeCarre highly praises it --- on the
cover! Montefiore asks ALL of the questions.....and answers MOST of them, too! Amazing.