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Simon Sebag Montefiore

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar Paperback – Illustrated, September 13, 2005

by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Author)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This widely acclaimed biography of a Soviet dictator and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of the Marxist leader and Russian tsar. • From thebestselling author of The Romanovs.

“The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler.... Disturbing and perplexing.” —The New York Times Book Review

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.

Print length

848 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

September 13, 2005
Dimensions

5.15 x 1.72 x 7.96 inches
ISBN-10

1400076781
ISBN-13

978-1400076789
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“An extraordinary book. . . . For anyone fascinated by the nature of evil—and by the effects of absolute power on human relationships—this book will provide new insights on every page.” —Anne Applebaum, Evening Standard (London)

“The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler. . . . Disturbing and perplexing.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Superb. . . . No Western writer has got as close. . . . A dark and excellent book.” —The New York Review of Books

“Terrific. . . . A deeply researched and wonderfully readable accomplishment—scholarship as a kind of savage gossip.” —Time

“Unprecedented in its intimacy and horrifying in its implications, not merely because it shows that the engineers of one of history’s greatest holocausts were depraved . . . but also because they emerge in these pages as surprisingly normal.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A marvelously well-researched book. . . . Montefiore has written a supremely important book about Joseph Stalin, a biography that other scholars will find hard to equal. This is sure to be one of the outstanding books of the year.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Ultra reader-friendly, lively, gossipy and packaged with revelations about the intimacies and intrigues of Stalin the man and his courtiers. Brilliant.” —Evening Standard Book Page

“A book that had to be written. . . . Montefiore’s biography is far different from anything in this genre. A superb piece of research and frighteningly lucid.” —The Washington Times

“Gripping and timely. . . . Montefiore has illuminated wider aspects of the history of the USSR. This is one of the few recent books on Stalinism that will be read in years to come.” —The Guardian (London)

“Montefiore combines his research among the primary sources and the fruits of his interviews into a focused, gripping story about a man, who, along with Mao, Hitler and Genghis Khan, has to be in the running for history’s greatest mass murderer.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[A] masterful and terrifying account of Stalin as seen within his close entourage. . . . Seldom has the picture been put in finer focus than by Montefiore.” —Alistair Horne, The Times (London)
“Horrific, revelatory and sobering. . . . A triumph of research.” —John le Carré, The Observer

“I loved the totalitarian high baroque sleaze of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin. . . . One of the 2004 Guardian Books of the Year.” —Simon Schama, The Guardian (London)

“A grim masterpiece shot through with lashes of black humor. . . . The personal details are riveting.” —Antonia Fraser, Mail on Sunday

“A well-researched and insightful book. . . . The narrative adroitly catches the atmosphere of the time.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“I did not think I could learn anything new about Stalin, but I was wrong. A stunning performance.” —Henry Kissinger

“Montefiore’s deft combination of biography and history brings Stalin alive, so that he becomes as complex and contradictory as any of the great characters in fiction.” —The New York Sun

“If you plan (wisely) to read only one book about Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, let it be Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Simon Sebag Montefiore, writing with the skill of a novelist . . . has based his highly readable biographical thriller solidly and factually not only on all of the preceding scholarly studies of the Soviet dictator but also upon newly available archival materials.” —The Seattle Times

“A large and ambitious overview—and under-view—of the Soviet leader’s life and epoch, drawn from an impressively wide array of Russian sources.” —The Atlantic Monthly

“Spectacular. . . . An impressive and compelling work, using important new documents.” —The Spectator

“Sebag Montefiore has done a valuable service in drawing our attention to a hitherto little-studied aspect of Stalinism. As his Stalin demonstrates, the personal relationships of those who ran the Kremlin provided an essential dynamic for the development of the Stalinist system. Isolated from the masses, these members of the privileged elite depended on one another for emotional sustenance to an extraordinary degree.” —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

From the Back Cover

Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes-as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag-has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century. But though the facts of Stalin's reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundation-human, psychological and physical-that supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him.
In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative elan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin's court from the time of his acclamation as "leader" in 1929, five years after Lenin's death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of seventy-three. Through the lens of personality-Stalin's as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them-the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalin's favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemmingway, "The Forsyte Saga and "The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenin's dictum, "A revolution without firing squads is meaningless"). We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia andcravenness that ruled the lives of Stalin's inner court, and we see how the dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the awful efficiency of his killing machine.
With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalin's court. And he traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalin's rule in the early 1930s gives way to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II (there has never been as acute an account of Stalin's meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the rest of his country.
"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin's dictatorship, and, as well, a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive and unforgiving.

"From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE is a historian of Russia and the Middle East. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Costa Biography Award, and le Grande Prix de la biographie politique. Jerusalem: The Biography was a worldwide best seller. Montefiore’s books are published in more than forty languages. He is the author of the novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter, which won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2014. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Montefiore graduated from Cambridge University, where he received his PhD. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1:
The Georgian and the Schoolgirl

Nadya and Stalin had been married for fourteen years but it extended deeper and longer than that, so steeped was their marriage in Bolshevism. They had shared the formative experiences of the underground life and intimacy with Lenin during the Revolution, then the Civil War. Stalin had known her family for nearly thirty years and he had first met her in 1904 when she was three. He was then twenty-five and he had been a Marxist for six years.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was not born on 21 December 1879, Stalin's official birthday. "Soso" was actually born in a tiny shack (that still exists) to Vissarion, or "Beso," and his wife Ekaterina, "Keke," née Geladze, over a year earlier on 6 December 1878. They lived in Gori, a small town beside the Kura River in the romantic, mountainous and defiantly un-Russian province of Georgia, a small country thousands of miles from the Tsar's capital: it was closer to Baghdad than St. Petersburg.* Westerners often do not realize how foreign Georgia was: an independent kingdom for millennia with its own ancient language, traditions, cuisine, literature, it was only consumed by Russia in gulps between 1801 and 1878. With its sunny climate, clannish blood feuds, songs and vineyards, it resembles Sicily more than Siberia.

Soso's father was a violent, drunken semi-itinerant cobbler who savagely beat both Soso and Keke. She in turn, as the child later recalled, "thrashed him mercilessly." Soso once threw a dagger at his father. Stalin reminisced how Beso and Father Charkviani, the local priest, indulged in drinking bouts together to the fury of his mother: "Father, don't make my husband a drunk, it'll destroy my family." Keke threw out Beso. Stalin was proud of her "strong willpower." When Beso later forcibly took Soso to work as a cobbling apprentice in Tiflis, Keke's priests helped get him back.

Stalin's mother took in washing for local merchants. She was pious and became close to the priests who protected her. But she was also earthy and spicy: she may have made the sort of compromises that are tempting for a penniless single mother, becoming the mistress of her employers. This inspired the legends that often embroider the paternity of famous men. It is possible that Stalin was the child of his godfather, an affluent innkeeper, officer and amateur wrestler named Koba Egnatashvili. Afterwards, Stalin protected Egnatashvili's two sons, who remained friends until his death and reminisced in old age about Egnatashvili's wrestling prowess. Nonetheless, one sometimes has to admit that great men are the children of their own fathers. Stalin was said to resemble Beso uncannily. Yet he himself once asserted that his father was a priest.

Stalin was born with the second and third toes of his left foot joined. He suffered a pock-marked face from an attack of smallpox and later damaged his left arm, possibly in a carriage accident. He grew up into a sallow, stocky, surly youth with speckled honey-coloured eyes and thick black hair-a kinto, Georgian street urchin. He was exceptionally intelligent with an ambitious mother who wanted him to be a priest, perhaps like his real father. Stalin later boasted that he learned to read at five by listening to Father Charkviani teaching the alphabet. The five-year-old then helped Charkviani's thirteen-year-old daughter with her reading.

In 1888, he entered the Gori Church School and then, triumphantly, in 1894, won a "five rouble scholarship" to the Tiflis Seminary in the Georgian capital. As Stalin later told a confidant, "My father found out that along with the scholarship, I also earned money (five roubles a month) as a choirboy . . . and once I went out and saw him standing there: " 'Young man, sir,' said Beso, 'you've forgotten your father . . . Give me at least three roubles, don't be as mean as your mother!'

" 'Don't shout!' replied Soso. 'If you don't leave immediately, I'll call the watchman!' " Beso slunk away.* He apparently died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1909.

Stalin sometimes sent money to help his mother but henceforth kept his distance from Keke whose dry wit and rough discipline resembled his own. There has been too much cod-psychology about Stalin's childhood but this much is certain: raised in a poor priest-ridden household, he was damaged by violence, insecurity and suspicion but inspired by the local traditions of religious dogmatism, blood-feuding and romantic brigandry. "Stalin did not like to speak about his parents and childhood" but it is meaningless to over-analyse his psychology. He was emotionally stunted and lacked empathy yet his antennae were supersensitive. He was abnormal but Stalin himself understood that politicians are rarely normal: History, he wrote later, is full of "abnormal people."

The seminary provided his only formal education. This boarding school's catechismic teaching and "Jesuitical methods" of "surveillance, spying, invasion of the inner life, the violation of people's feelings" repelled, but impressed, Soso so acutely that he spent the rest of his life refining their style and methods. It stimulated this autodidact's passion for reading but he became an atheist in the first year. "I got some friends," he said, "and a bitter debate started between the believers and us!" He soon embraced Marxism.

In 1899, he was expelled from the seminary, joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party and became a professional revolutionary, adopting the nom de revolution Koba, inspired by the hero of a novel, The Parricide, by Alexander Kazbegi, a dashing, vindictive Caucasian outlaw. He combined the "science" of Marxism with his soaring imagination: he wrote romantic poetry, published in Georgian, before working as a weatherman at the Tiflis Meteorological Institute, the only job he held before becoming one of the rulers of Russia in 1917.

"Koba" was convinced by the universal panacea of Marxism, "a philosophical system" that suited the obsessive totality of his character. The class struggle also matched his own melodramatic pugnacity. The paranoid secrecy of the intolerant and idiosyncratic Bolshevik culture dovetailed with Koba's own self-contained confidence and talent for intrigue. Koba plunged into the underworld of revolutionary politics that was a seething, stimulating mixture of conspiratorial intrigue, ideological nitpicking, scholarly education, factional games, love affairs with other revolutionaries, police infiltration and organizational chaos. These revolutionaries hailed from every background-Russians, Armenians, Georgians and Jews, workers, noblemen, intellectuals and daredevils-and organized strikes, printing presses, meetings and heists. United in the obsessional study of Marxist literature, there was always a division between the educated bourgeois émigrés, like Lenin himself, and the rough men of action in Russia itself. The underground life, always itinerant and dangerous, was the formative experience not only of Stalin but of all his comrades. This explains much that happens later.

In 1902, Koba won the spurs of his first arrest and Siberian exile, the first of seven such exiles from which he escaped six times. These exiles were far from Stalin's brutal concentration camps: the Tsars were inept policemen. They were almost reading holidays in distant Siberian villages with one part-time gendarme on duty, during which revolutionaries got to know (and hate) each other, corresponded with their comrades in Petersburg or Vienna, discussed abstruse questions of dialectical materialism, and had affairs with local girls. When the call of freedom or revolution became urgent, they escaped, yomping across the taiga to the nearest train. In exile, Koba's teeth, a lifelong source of pain, began to deteriorate.

Koba avidly supported Vladimir Lenin and his seminal work, What Is to Be Done? This domineering political genius combined the Machiavellian practicality of seizing power with mastery of Marxist ideology. Exploiting the schism that would lead to the creation of his own Bolshevik Party, Lenin's message was that a supreme Party of professional revolutionaries could seize power for the workers and then rule in their name in a "dictatorship of the proletariat" until this was no longer necessary because socialism had been achieved. Lenin's vision of the Party as "the advance detachment" of the "army of proletarians . . . a fighting group of leaders" set the militarist tone of Bolshevism.

In 1904, on Koba's return to Tiflis, he met his future father-in-law Sergei Alliluyev, twelve years his senior, a skilled Russian electrical artisan married to Olga Fedorenko, a strong-willed Georgian-German-Gypsy beauty with a taste for love affairs with revolutionaries, Poles, Hungarians, even Turks. It was whispered that Olga had an affair with the young Stalin, who fathered his future wife, Nadya. This is false since Nadezhda was already three when her parents first met Koba, but his affair with Olga is entirely credible and he himself may have hinted at it. Olga, who, according to her granddaughter Svetlana, had a "weakness for southern men," saying "Russian men are boors," always had a "soft spot" for Stalin. Her marriage was difficult. Family legend has Nadya's elder brother Pavel seeing his mother making up to Koba. Such short liaisons were everyday occurrences among revolutionaries.

Long before they fell in love, Stalin and Nadya were part of the Bolshevik family who passed through the Alliluyev household: Kalinin and Yenukidze among others at that dinner in 1932. There was another special link: soon afterwards, Koba met the Alliluyevs in Baku, and saved Nadya from drowning in the Caspian Sea, a romantic bond if ever there was one.

Koba meanwhile married another sprig of a Bolshevik family. Ekaterina, "Kato," a placid, darkly pretty Georgian daughter of a cultured family, was the sister of Alexander Svanidze, also a Bolshevik graduate of the Tiflis seminary who joined Stalin's Kremlin entourage. Living in a hut near the Baku oilfields, Kato gave him a son, Yakov. But Koba's appearances at home were sporadic and unpredictable.

During the 1905 Revolution, in which Leon Trotsky, a Jewish journalist, bestrode the Petersburg Soviet, Koba claimed he was organizing peasant revolts in the Kartli region of Georgia. After the Tsarist backlash, he travelled to a Bolshevik conference in Tammerfors, Finland-his first meeting with his hero, Lenin, "that mountain eagle." The next year, Koba travelled to the Congress in Stockholm. On his return, he lived the life of a Caucasian brigand, raising Party funds in bank robberies or "expropriations": he boasted in old age of these "heists . . . our friends grabbed 250,000 roubles in Yerevan Square!"

After visiting London for a Congress, Koba's beloved, half-ignored Kato died "in his arms" in Tiflis of tuberculosis on 25 November 1907. Koba was heartbroken. When the little procession reached the cemetery, Koba pressed a friend's hand and said, "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for people." He pressed his heart: "It's desolate here inside." Yet he left their son Yakov to be brought up by Kato's family. After hiding in the Alliluyevs' Petersburg apartment, he was recaptured and returned to his place of banishment, Solvychegodsk. It was in this remote one-horse town in January 1910 that Koba moved into the house of a young widow named Maria Kuzakova by whom he fathered a son.* Soon afterwards, he was involved in a love affair with a schoolgirl of seventeen named Pelageya Onufrieva. When she went back to school, he wrote: "Let me kiss you now. I am not simply sending a kiss but am KISSSSSING you passionately (it's not worth kissing otherwise)." The locals in the north Russified "Iosef" to "Osip" and his letters to Pelageya were often signed by her revealing nickname for him: "Oddball Osip."

After yet another escape, Koba returned to Petersburg in 1912, sharing digs with a ponderous Bolshevik who was to be the comrade most closely associated with him: Vyacheslav Scriabin, only twenty-two, had just followed the Bolshevik custom of assuming a macho nom de revolution and called himself that "industrial name" Molotov-"the hammer." Koba had also assumed an "industrial" alias: he first signed an article "Stalin" in 1913. It was no coincidence that "Stalin" sounds like "Lenin." He may have been using it earlier and not just for its metallic grit. Perhaps he borrowed the name from the "buxom pretty" Bolshevik named Ludmilla Stal with whom he had had an affair.

This "wonderful Georgian," as Lenin called him, was co-opted by the Party's Central Committee at the end of the Prague conference of 1912. In November, Koba Stalin travelled from Vienna to Cracow to meet Lenin with whom he stayed: the leader supervised his keen disciple in the writing of an article expressing Bolshevik policy on the sensitive nationality question, henceforth Stalin's expertise. "Marxism and the National Question," arguing for holding together the Russian Empire, won him ideological kudos and Lenin's trust.

"Did you write all of it?" asked Lenin (according to Stalin).

"Yes . . . Did I make mistakes?"

"No, on the contrary, splendid!" This was his last trip abroad until the Teheran Conference in 1943.

In February 1913, Stalin was rearrested and given a suspiciously light exile: was he an agent of the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana? The historical sensationalism of Stalin's duplicity shows a naïve misunderstanding of underground life: the revolutionaries were riddled with Okhrana spies but many were double or triple agents.* Koba was willing to betray colleagues who opposed him though, as the Okhrana admitted in their reports, he remained a fanatical Marxist-and that is what mattered.

Stalin's final exile began in 1913 in the distant cold north-east of Siberia, where he was nicknamed "Pock-marked Joe" by the local peasants. Fearing more escapes, the exile was moved to Kureika, a desolate village in Turukhansk, north of the Arctic Circle where his fishing prowess convinced locals of magical powers and he took another mistress. Stalin wrote pitiful letters to Sergei and Olga Alliluyev: "Nature in this cursed region is shamefully poor" and he begged them to send him a postcard: "I'm crazy with longing for nature scenes if only on paper." Yet it was also, strangely, a happy time, perhaps the happiest of his life for he reminisced about his exploits there until his death, particularly about the shooting expedition when he skied into the taiga, bagged many partridges and then almost froze to death on the way back.

The military blunders and food shortages of the Great War inexorably destroyed the monarchy which, to the surprise of the Bolsheviks, collapsed suddenly in February 1917, replaced by a Provisional Government. On 12 March, Stalin reached the capital and visited the Alliluyevs: once again, Nadya, a striking brunette, sixteen, her sister Anna and brother Fyodor, questioned this returning hero about his adventures. When they accompanied him by tram towards the offices of the newspaper Pravda, he called out, "Be sure to set aside a room in the new apartment for me. Don't forget." He found Molotov editing Pravda, a job he immediately commandeered for himself. While Molotov had taken a radical anti-government line, Stalin and Lev Kamenev, né Rosenfeld, one of Lenin's closest comrades, were more conciliatory. Lenin, who arrived on 4 April, overruled Stalin's vacillations.

In a rare apology to Molotov, Stalin conceded, "You were closer to Lenin . . ." When Lenin needed to escape to Finland to avoid arrest, Stalin hid him chez Alliluyev, shaved off his beard and escorted him to safety.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (September 13, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 848 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400076781
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400076789
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.7 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 1.72 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #60,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Historical Russia Biographies
- #38 in Russian & Soviet Politics
- #135 in Russian History (Books)

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Simon Sebag Montefiore

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Simon Sebag Montefiore is the internationally bestselling author of prize-winning history and novels. HIs books are now published in 48 languages.

His latest book is THE WORLD: A FAMILY HISTORY - a history of humanity, unlike any previous world history: it uses family, the one thing all humans have in common, to tell the story. It is genuinely global, spanning all eras and all continents, from the perspective of places as diverse as Haiti, Congo and Cambodia as well as Europe, China and America. From the stone age to the drone age, it features a cast of extraordinary span and diversity: as well as rulers and conquerors there are priests, prophets, charlatans, artists, scientists, doctors, tycoons, gangsters, rockstars, lovers, husbands, wives and children. All human drama is here - all the way to Putin and Zelensky. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World is both a celebration and an indictment that takes the human story, in a single narrative by a master storyteller.

He is the author of a Russian Quartet on Russian potentates: THE ROMANOVS: the story of the Russian Empire 1613-1918; CATHERINE THE GREAT & POTEMKIN: Love, Power and the Russian Empire; YOUNG STALIN and STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR.

His wider history of the Middle East, JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY, chronicles the Holy City and the region, covering from pre-history to 2020, from King David to today.

He has curated two anthologies of speeches and letters - VOICES OF HISTORY: SPEECHES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and WRITTEN IN HISTORY: LETTERS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.

As a novelist, he is the author of the Moscow Trilogy: SASHENKA, ONE NIGHT IN WINTER and Red Sky at Noon.

Montefiore has written a series of childrens’ novels - ROYAL RABBITS OF LONDON - with Santa Montefiore.

Montefiore has won prizes for his works, both non-fiction and fiction. His novel, ONE NIGHT IN WINTER won the Best Political Novel of the Year Prize (UK) and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize. CATHERINE THE GREAT & POTEMKIN was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and Marsh Biography Prizes (UK). STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. YOUNG STALIN won the Costa Biography Award (UK), the LA Times Book Prize for Biography (USA), Le Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique (France) and the Kreisky Prize for Political Literature (Austria). JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY has now sold over a million cover internationally: it won the Wenjin Book of the Year Prize (awarded by the Library of China, People's Republic of China) and the Book of the Year Prize from the Jewish Book Council (USA). THE ROMANOVS won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Literature Prize (Italy), was chosen as one of Oprah Winfrey's Books of the Year (USA).

Many of his books are now being developed as TV drama series or movies.

Montefiore read history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University where he was awarded his Doctorate of Philosophy. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham, Dr Montefiore has written and presented fiver BBC TV series including Jerusalem (2011); Rome (2012) and Istanbul/Constantinople - 'Byzantium: a tale of 3 cities' (2013); Spain - 'Blood & Gold' (2015) and Vienna (2016).

Follow the author on twitter: @simonmontefiore. On Instagram: @simonsebag_montefiore

For more information: www.simonsebagmontefiore.com

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dmiguer

Sands Through The Hourglass

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 31, 2021

Verified Purchase

"Death solves all problems...no man, no problem." - Stalin

This book has been reviewed thoroughly, so I will only add a few impressions. It was written by Simon Sebag-Montefiore (SSM) scion of a wealthy Sephardi clan whose grandparents fled Russia at the start of the 20th century and alighted in England. He has a different approach in his portrait of Stalin than I'm familiar with. Using recently released papers and letters, and aided by fellow historians Robert Conquest and Robert Service, he picks up from his earlier volume after 1932 with the suicide of Stalin's wife Nadya. With many quotes included it has a novelistic feel. At times I wondered how can it be known just what was said? Interviews, diaries and memoirs were extensively employed. The events reveal a true life tragedy.

Five Year Plan
As a political drama it is fascinating. Who could resist a cast of characters including Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Zhukov and Khruschev all speaking aloud? SSM is no sympathizer but you hear of Stalin's tears, fears, personal foibles and public failures. To industrialize and militarize during the Five Year Plan of 1928-33 the Central Committee seized grain from peasants for export, starving millions. Commissars scoured villages looking for hidden food. As the gulags grew kulaks were killed. To qualify as a wealthy farmer one need only a cow or hired hand. The ulterior motive was to break their backs and revolutionize farming into collectives. The USSR catapulted into 2nd place behind US industry, the Politburo pitted against each other.

The Great Terror
After wife Nadya's suicide, seen as a seminal event, there was a ruthless elimination of enemies of the state pondered for years. Stalin admired Hitler's Night of the Long Knives. The assassination of a Leningrad leader led to the Great Terror of 1936-39 beginning with the Moscow Show Trials where old school Bolsheviks were liquidated. By 1937 Stalin consolidated his grip on power as undisputed dictator. He established extra-judicial trials and secret police squads who murdered and sent millions to labor camps. At it's peak the Central Committee signed mass death warrants that only specified the required number of victims. The denunciations culminated in a purge of Stalin's close friends and family guided by his own hand.

Pre-WWII
1939 saw a pause in the torture and poison; there was no one left to arrest. Strategic mistakes had been made as top diplomats and generals were purged. Before the German invasion of 1941 Stalin chose alignment with Hitler despite ideological differences. Agreeing to divide Poland Germany built up forces on the border as Stalin refused to mobilize. He suspected a British plot as the Luftwaffe began to bomb Soviet cities. Political and military leaders feared to object. With Leningrad and Moscow under siege a million troops were executed for desertion or treason. Terror still had it's uses; the Motherland was not prepared for war. The old guard preferred cannons to rockets and horses to tanks, the Wehrmacht mired in mud.

WWII
NKVD chief Beria turned gulags to military production, while Molotov flew off to meet Churchill and FDR. Back in the USSR Churchill was insulted by insinuations the British were afraid to fight. On route to Stalingrad Khruschev lost a million men, thousands of tanks and aircraft. Stalin knew he needed to call in professionals, and General Zhukov was reinstated to his command. As the Red Army raped and pillaged their way to Berlin Stalin deported millions to Siberia and seized states for the USSR. There are accounts of conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, as the Big Three met. When Churchill proposed to use the Pope as an ally Stalin asked "How many divisions does he have?" Truman dropped news of the Bomb.

Post-WWII
Seen as too popular after the war, Zhukov was demoted as military chief and posted to a remote region. Beria knew where bodies were hidden, and was replaced as security chief. Foreign minister Molotov, too soft on the west and ambitious for succession, was relieved of his office. Although Jewish comrades had long been in Soviet leadership Stalin now saw a vast American-Zionist conspiracy to subvert the USSR. A movement to establish a Jewish refuge in Crimea was prologue to a new wave of repression. Stalin purged writers and doctors in anticipation of mass deportations but luckily he died in 1953. Khruschev, fallen from favor over fighting and famine in the Ukraine, was able to advance himself after Stalin's death.

An interesting aspect of this book is the pseudo-religious side of Bolshevism. It isn't discussed much, except in the ceremonial removal of Lenin's relics during the Nazi invasion and Stalin's transport of Lenin's death mask lit by a lamp wherever he went. There is a troubling resemblance of Stalin as heir to the Tsar, Kremlin ruler, intercedent of God and father of the people. It seems similar with Mao seen as a new emperor residing in the Forbidden City and son of a heavenly Marxist world. We can compare the propaganda and regalia of Hitler's Aryan ruse. Although attempted religion was not wiped out or replaced. The narratives were of a kind, personality cults celebrated with messianic fervor by the masses.

I watched a recent comedy 'The Death of Stalin' which was hilarious. A mini-series of this book would be terrifying. It is not a general history of the Stalinist period. Major events are heard through the words of key actors. If you want to sit at a meeting or dinner table with Stalin this may be your best bet. It is better to experience these things vicariously than to live through them. It is light and fast reading. It is also a depressing look at human beings. SSM doesn't dwell on the pain but there was plenty. I'm convinced of what many have said before: Mao was Stalin's most diligent student. His personal style, political struggles and purges were all but identical. If the lessons haven't been learned there will be more to come.

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Gray Kitty

A tour de force, and extremely hard to put down, but not an introduction to the subject matter.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 22, 2015

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Not for beginners, but a very engrossing look into the inner workings of the Soviet ruling class during Stalin's lifetime. I bought this book after reading J Arch Getty's Road to Terror, which is more focused on institutions than personalities and, while also hard to put down, didn't talk much about the people involved. I think Mr. Sebag Montefiore did a great job of filling in what I was curious about and then some. It took me about two weeks to read.

This book has been derided as gossipy but the author goes to lengths to contemplate how personal relationships affected more important things like the course of Soviet history. It is true that the focus is clearly on personalities rather than grand historical events (about which much more ink has been spilled in any case) and there are certainly trivial details like what people wore. However, I think the trivia add color without detracting from the scholarly value of the work. A lot of research went into this book and it shows (not least in the length of the footnotes). You learn a great deal about the constraints Stalin operated under--he was surely a dictator, but his actual level of dictatorial power varied (reaching its height during the purges, I think). And there were certainly times that he altered his behavior or decisions because of contradictory subordinates (especially generals) and/or the likely reaction of the Politburo.

Other reviewers have commented on how Arendt's "banality of evil" applies to Stalin and his cronies, but I was also reminded of a line in the film Amelie wherein the protagonist's friend questions her love interest. She asks him to complete a series of proverbs and states that "a man who knows all his proverbs can't be all bad" the essence of this meaning, as I interpreted it, that someone who engages with their heritage comes away with a positive effect on him or herself. There is also Anne Frank's statement that there's good in all people. Court of the Red Tsar more or less takes this to its furthest extent: We see Stalin ordering the murder of Poskrebyshev's wife and his trusted bodyguard Pauker (both things I was curious about "why"--and Montefiore more or less answers them as best as they can be answered), the arrest or murder of many others (though he sort of leaves Lakoba's and Pavel Alliluyev's deaths unexplained--the former was surely murder, but the extent of Stalin's responsibility is unknown; the latter is ambiguous), and generally turning on his friends and family in a most lethal way. All this on top of his already well documented leadership of purges, etc--the author frequently identifies attempts to blame Beria, Yezhov etc (monsters in their own right) for things that ultimately roll up to Stalin.

All the while, he is writing letters to help the most random people such as the tsarist cop who guarded him in exile (vouched for because he wasn't very hard on the younger Stalin), enjoying cultivating roses in his garden, humoring someone who writes to him asking to be his brother, reading a huge variety of literature from around the world, fretting that he wasted Lenin's "legacy" by not preparing for the German invasion (which is rich on multiple levels, but it is hard to fathom in context why he would say it in an insincere way), and perhaps most incongruously, caring for a houseguest who had passed out by putting a blanket over him. (In a similar vein, cronies like Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, and even Beria are shown going out of their way to intercede on behalf of people and correct injustices of the Soviet system from time to time, despite their overall role in perpetuating the Stalinist regime).

Indeed, it would be difficult for some Western readers to get through all the positive anecdotes (I kid you not, there are many in this book) and still be willing to call Stalin a monster. But Montefiore does it, and rightly so. If anything, the takeaway is that when it comes to morality, there comes a point when the good cannot cancel out all the bad: you can enjoy learning and culture and genuinely care about/for others and still be an evil person overall. When the blood of millions is on your hands, there's not much you can do to make up for it even if you try--and the impression is that Stalin didn't exactly try as much as he simply had occasional outbursts of common decency. Montefiore seems aware of this, and charts a very sensible course that is non-polemical without striving pointlessly for artificial objectivity.

This book requires a reasonable level of familiarity with the subject matter to get the most out of it. For instance, the Cheka/OGPU/MGB/KGB are basically all the same organization, but the narrative uses each one according to what the agency was known as in the timeframe being discussed. There is one footnote explaining the term "Chekist" but otherwise you just have to know this from elsewhere. Still, if you're willing to stop reading to look things up it's entirely accessible to a general audience.

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Holland1953

Confusing as hell.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 1, 2022

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I perchance became aware of this book through YouTube when I saw the author - the highly respected author Simon Sebag Montefiore being interviewed by an American interviewer, obviously in total awe of the author being on excellent terms with the British Royal family.
Montefiore explained in beautiful terms how he was allowed access to THE most confidential information on Stalin, family data and interviews with some of the most elusive people who had known Stalin and many of his cohorts.
Like every single predecessor writing about Russian history or novels, Montefiore makes the same deep mistake of referring to every single character in his/her full name, pet name, nickname, child's name, assumed name and every single other nomenclature of that particular person, in every single sentence, paragraph and chapter.
This leads to gargantuan confusions and constant back referrals to previous pages as to whom the author is referring, sometimes even as far back as the 1st chapter.
When one character after another is presented into the story, followed by the vast assortment of names in random order, the joy of continuing the book is heavily compromised.
Oddly enough, Lavrenti Beria is always referred to as 'Beria', or some other nomenclature giving all reference to his bloody tenure.
The author also takes liberties with technical details regarding firearms by using the term, 'Chagan pistol' - which does not exist.
Eventually, I took to writing my own list of a growing amount of characters, along with their slew of names and kept it next to me every single time I read the book.
Be like me - write that list.

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Adrian J. Smith

A masterful panorama of the Stalin years

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 25, 2018

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A gripping and truly masterful work. Simon Sebag Montefiore has put together a very adept, voluminous work of scholarship that is by far the most broadranging and far sighted work on Stalin that this reader has yet read (though still have yet to read Service's biography).
In the preface, Montefiore acknowledges his collaboration with the other masterful scholars of Stalinism, Robert Service and Oleg Khlevniuk, so this leads me to think of this book as not a competitor to the other masterful scholars, but rather a stand alone work to be read on its own merits, along with the other works.
So why read this, by far the lengthiest out of the aforementioned works, rather than the more concise offerings from Service or Khlevniuk? Because this is by far the most broad ranging panorama of Stalin's court. It entirely lives up to its title, it covers all the characters and intrigue of Stalin's court, so think of this work not so much as a biography (although it definitely is) and more of a panorama. In this sense, the strength of this work is the insight into all the other characters, giving perhaps the fullest picture of the politics of the Stalin era this reader has yet read.
The book itself is lengthy and challenging, and this was completed on my second attempt. It begins as something of a slow starter, and the covering of Stalin's terror is very detailed and becomes lengthy at times, but if one wants a complete picture, then one is unlikely to be disappointed.
In short a masterful work, confirming Simon Sebag Montefiore as one of the pre-eminent historians of the modern day.

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North Yorkshire

The life more than the times

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 30, 2019

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As the title suggests this is a book about Stalin the man and his 'magnates' (big bosses like Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov, Yezhov, Kaganovich, and so on). These are the guys familiar (to dumb it all down a bit) from The Death of Stalin. Following on from the excellent 1st volume, this one runs from the 1920s through to Stalin's death and this covers collectivization, the Terror, and World War II. But with its focus on the big bosses the geopolitical aspects are a bit underplayed. The author writes well and it is probably my fault for being a dry old stick, but I wanted more of the big picture.

I expected to like this book more and I can't quite think why this solid, well researched and very well written book on a subject I am interested in didn't excite me. There is a good level of detail and I couldn't complain, given the title does explain exactly what's in it. But it did feel a bit claustrophobic and when the perspective widens (as in chapter 23 when the cultural scene is filled in) it felt much more engaging and informative. Perhaps I have been spoiled by Dikotter's excellently balanced books on Mao where the big perspective is so well integrated with the political and personal levels?

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Amazon Customer

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 5, 2020

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Everyone knows Stalin was an absolute monster. No better than the other dictators who rose in Europe in Germany, Italy and Spain during the early 20th Century. Despite vastly different political outlooks, when dictators arise, the outcome is always the same.

This is a story of a ruthless lunatic who ended up responsible for the deaths of millions including his own supporters. If there is one thing to be grateful for is that Russia bore the brunt of Nazi aggression and turned around the war which given that Stalin had purged the army of many of its officers is a miracle of some proportion.

Ian Kershaw's book about the period between WW 1 and 2 makes some very good points to read in conjunction with this. Horrendous decisions about the war reparations and the break up of old empires created unstable governments in the buffer countries between East and West so that when war arose, the people there suffered horrendously as one side then the other gained the upper hand. Neither treated the local people with either compassion or even consideration.

When politics breaks down and dictators arise, life becomes unbearable and unpredictable.

A highly recommended book

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Maxim Ford

Colour supplement history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 1, 2022

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Why are people drawn to histories of the Soviet Union? Because in a world of Empires and colonies a revolution took place and for the first time ran an economy to a plan without owners, without a capitalist class. We know that the revolution born out of the terror of the first World War, the Tsarist autocracy and white and red terror of the civil war resulted in mass repression and murder. This is documented but what is lacking is any explanation why. Also missing is any understanding of Marxism and what the Communists were trying to do. Also what they did do and how, after all they turned a backward power into a superpower. A few years after Stalin the Soviets put a man into space. The author is also dishonest in his descriptions of Stalin as a Tsar and other leaders as "Magnets" , they were political revolutionaries, that is the essence of why their story is of interest. This is followed by other propaganda themes, new Soviet "Empire", Marxism is a religion, describing a thing as it's exact opposite. The answers I wanted are just not here, how they built a new educational system, how they eliminated illiteracy, how they trained a whole new class of scientists, tractor drivers, a train system capable of moving the whole of Soviet industry from West to East and a Soviet Army from East to West. What Sebag also forgets is that Stalin led a world wide communist movement that fought for the independence of colonies, for liberation of Vietnam, for civil rights in the USA, for dockers wages in the UK, and the defeat of fascism. These communist changed our world for the better, if you have a health service and education and a Trade Union a communist will have help bring it in to being. The idea of human liberation was greatly expanded by Stalin if also betrayed by him.

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jtwoodfield

Fascinating but far, far too long

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 19, 2022

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The story, the research, the writing all command and deserve respect. In that the book vividly portrays a close knit group of mass murderers who were so amoral that they unswervingly continued as a loyal cabal even when their own families were imprisoned, tortured and killed it is a nearly nauseous account. One that should be read as an antidote to corrosive ideology of the left, or the right.
Reading it however is not an unalloyed pleasure despite the prose. For the simple teston that it is far, far too long. An editor as ruthless as Stalin ot one of his magnates would have had a benign role to play.
As ever, a Kindle major irritation is that there is no relief from prolixity until the bitter end. All the photographs are at the back. When are Amazon going to sort looking at the pictures not being counted as the last page read?

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Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar Paperback – Illustrated, September 13, 2005

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