Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Joseph Stalin #2

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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 the bestselling 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.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Russia, Politics, Russian History, European History

850 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 10, 2003

About the author

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of the global bestsellers 'The Romanovs' and 'Jerusalem: the Biography,' 'Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar' and Young Stalin and the novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter and "Red Sky at Noon." His books are published in 48 languages and are worldwide bestsellers. He has won prizes in both non-fiction and fiction. He read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD).
'The Romanovs' is his latest history book. He has now completed his Moscow Trilogy of novels featuring Benya Golden and Comrade Satinov, Sashenka, Dashka and Fabiana.... and Stalin himself.


Buy in the UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Winter-...

"A thrilling work of fiction. Montefiore weaves a tight, satisfying plot, delivering surprises to the last page. Stalin's chilling charisma is brilliantly realised. The novel's theme is Love: family love, youthful romance, adulterous passion. One Night in Winter is full of redemptive love and inner freedom." Evening Standard

"Gripping and cleverly plotted. Doomed love at the heart of a violent society is the heart of Montefiore's One Night in Winter... depicting the Kafkaesque labyrinth into which the victims stumble." The Sunday Times

"Compulsively involving. Our fear for the children keeps up turning the pages... We follow the passions with sympathy... The knot of events tugs at a wide range of emotions rarely experienced outside an intimate tyranny." The Times

"The novel is hugely romantic. His ease with the setting and historical characters is masterly. The book maintains a tense pace. Uniquely terrifying. Heartrending. Engrossing. " The Scotsman

“Delicately plotted and buried within a layered, elliptical narrative, One Night in Winter is also a fidgety page-turner which adroitly weaves a huge cast of characters into an arcane world.” Time Out

“A novel full of passion, conspiracy, hope, despair, suffering and redemption, it transcends boundaries of genre, being at once thriller and political drama, horror and romance. His ability to paint Stalin in such a way to make the reader quake with fire is matched by talent for creating truly heartbreaking characters: the children who find themselves at the centre of a conspiracy, the parents…. A gripping read and must surely be one of the best novels of 2013. ” NY Journal of Books

"Not just a thumpingly good read, but also essentially a story of human fragility and passions, albeit taking place under the intimidating shadow of a massive Stalinist portico." The National

"Seriously good fun... the Soviet march on Berlin, nightmarish drinking games at Stalin's countryhouse, the magnificence of the Bolshoi, interrogations, snow, sex and exile... lust adultery and romance. Eminently readable and strangely affecting." Sunday Telegraph

" "Hopelessly romantic and hopelessly moving. A mix of lovestory thriller and historical fiction. Engrossing." The Observer

“Gripping. Montefiore’s characters snare our sympathy and we follow them avidly. This intricate at times disturbing, always absorbing novel entertains and disturbs and seethes with moral complexity. Characters real+fictitious ring strikingly true.It is to a large extent Tolstoyan …..” The Australian

“Enthralling. Montefiore writes brilliantly about Love - from teenage romance to the grand passion of adultery. Readers of Sebastian Faulks and Hilary Mantel will lap this up. A historical novel that builds into a nail-biting drama … a world that resembles… Edith Wharton with the death penalty.” Novel of

Reviews

[Brett C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second book authored by Simon Sebag Montefiore and I thought it was great. The writing is superb and well-researched. This is the personal and intimate story of Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili from beginning to end. Of course there are politics, limited foreign policy exchanges, and diplomacy with outside leaders but this book focuses on the deeper layers of Joseph Stalin.

Joseph "Soso" Djugashvili was born into poverty in the rural mountainous country of Georgia in 1878. Roughing his early life as a street urchin he eventually got accepted into seminary to become a priest. In 1899 he was expelled and joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. This where his criminal/political life began under the nom de revolution Koba, inspired by the hero of a novel "The Parricide", by Alexander Kazbegi, a dashing, vindictive Caucasian outlaw, pg. 27.

Koba eventually assumes the "industrial" alias Stalin in 1913, pg. 30, and his political life really takes off with the revolution, the civil war, and his assumption of power after Lenin's death. Stalin was a father to his three children yet showed favoritism to his youngest daughter Svetlana. He was also a devoted, loving, and caring husband to the his first and second wife. In 1907 his first wife Ekaterina died of tuberculosis and he is quoted saying "She died and with her my last warm feelings for people" pg. 29. The suicide of his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1932 was the point of no return for Stalin. He wept, cried, and was cared for by close family and friends. Yet after this tragedy, he emerged a different man. His remorseless climb to power was bloody and his retention of power was even bloodier. Something that stuck out to me was pg. 198 when Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed, shot in the head as they begged to call Comrade Joseph Vissarionovich to spare their lives. I envisioned the scene from Miller's Crossing when actor John Turturro was led into the forest and on his knees begging for his life "Look into your heart, PLEASE!!"

Stalin's reign of Terror on the population and purging his own leadership are all in this book. Stalin's famine war on the Ukraine, the mass deportations and mass murders, sending millions to he gulags, and purging his own leadership staff were clear indicators of a truly psychotic and paranoid leader. He even eventually murdered those closest to him and even his henchmen who carried out Stalin's murderous killing quotas. "In this, the Terror differed most from Hitler's crimes which systematically destroyed a limited target: Jews and Gypsies. Here, on the contrary, death was sometimes random: the long-forgotten comment, the flirtation with the opposition, envy of another man's job, wife, or house, vengeance or just plain coincidence brought the death and torture of entire families." pg. 229.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. The material presented was well-organized, presented clearly, and full of information. This book is not dry and dull but very interesting and kept me hooked throughout the book. I would recommend any book written by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Thanks!

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

This remarkable book details how Stalin ran the Soviet Union as his fiefdom using terror to gain and maintain power. He was a brutal man and mass murderer. He was also a talented man, well read with an intellectual side. While he could be seething and overbearing, he was also a charmer, a quality he used very effectively. He knew how to use fear. He was a cunning manipulator, a skill he employed to keep everyone in their place at both an individual and a national level. Without a second thought he could turn on a life-long close friend and have him or her tortured and shot, yet he was capable of kindness, particularly to children. He read people and situations well, but easily became overconfident which undermined his competence. He survived by iron will and force of personality. An ideologue, he and his comrades started out with a desire to create a new Russia for the common people. But his persistent paranoia dominated all his other traits. His creation became a twisted hell.

Montefiore built his manuscript from interviews, memoirs, and archives. In the 1990s he toured the former Soviet Union interviewing people who had known Stalin or his associates including many children of key figures. His rich blending of sources gives you the feeling of being there as Stalin interacts with his “court” and family, whether at formal meetings or private gatherings. Many conversations are quoted. We see the give and take, the everyday, and we get a feel for Stalin and those around him. Montefiore gives us the material to form our own views. With any presentation as complex and nuanced as this one much is revealed, but we are still left with many questions. For those interested, my notes follow. They do not reflect the intimate tone or broad scope of the book, just things I felt important enough to jot down.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, “Soso”, born in 1878 grew up an abused child, dirt poor, essentially a street urchin, in Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains. His quick mind earned him a place in the local church school and then the seminary. This upbringing, his confidence and taste for intrigue led him to join the Bolshevik underground in 1899. In 1906 Soso married Kato who he loved dearly and gave him a son before she died of TB in 1907. He said, “…with her died my last warm feelings for people.” Soso went on to fund the Party by robbing banks or as he called these crimes “expropriations.” He was arrested and escaped many times as he helped organize the Bolsheviks. He adopted a revolutionary name, Koba, from the hero of a novel. In 1912 he met Vladimir Lenin for whom he wrote Marxist articles. Koba became Koba Stalin adopting a gritty name that sounded similar to Lenin.

In the wake of the 1917 revolution fighting the Whites, Lenin encouraged Stalin to be ever more brutal. Promoted to Commissar he summarily killed resistors and anyone he distrusted. One associate, Voroshilov, said Stalin conducted “a ruthless purge…administered by an iron hand.” Commissar Stalin met his second wife, Nadya his 17 year old typist, 22 years his junior, in 1917 marrying her in 1919. In 1922 Lenin made Stalin General Secretary of the Central Committee (CC), a job with wide-ranging power. Lenin would turn against the power grabbing Stalin, but too late, dying in 1924. With Lenin gone, other CC members were more afraid of Trotsky and backed Stalin to head the Party.

Before long they realized their mistake. By 1926 Stalin was taking control backed by a coterie of radical cohorts. The 1928 grain crisis established Stalin’s brutal approach: blame the kulaks (mostly prosperous peasants with a couple of workers or cows, or just resisters), force them into collectives or kill or deport them and put on some show trials for intimidation. As the crisis worsened in the next couple of years the goal became to eliminate kulaks and resistors completely. To finance industrialization the government was taking any and all grain it could find.

Stalin and other Party leaders lived together in the Kremlin with their wives and children, all in constant interaction with each other. They were zealots who had come up together. Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich among others were often in the Stalin household. The men drank together. Wives were influential. Nadya didn’t hesitate to confront Stalin. Couples frequently dined together. Their children played together. Families holidayed together. While in the Kremlin they lived without luxury, Stalin and Nadya included. Maintaining the image of a dutiful Bolshevik was important. Still they had servants, plenty of food, dachas outside the city and holiday homes in the south.

They referred to themselves as “responsible workers”. These tightly knit Party leaders were mostly in their thirties. They were idealistic, ruthless and hell bent to build an industrial socialist republic immediately. As much of a beast as Stalin was, he knew how to turn on the charm. He used that talent very successfully to get his way and he also used monetary rewards. While Stalin allowed old friends to criticize him, he was paranoid and he found ways to get rid of those perceived as a threat. He made extensive use of the secret police (OGPU) to ensure loyalty. Still in the 1920’s, Stalin did not have total power. Oligarchic rule still prevailed.

In 1932 mass starvation engulfed Ukraine killing 5 to 10 million. Stalin doubled down on his cruel policies: Taking every morsel of grain his agents could find, killing or deporting resistors and any Party members with a hint of a conscience. Cracking down Stalin appointed the duplicitous, ruthless Beria to a position of power. In November Nadya, a manic depressive who was frequently jealous, committed suicide. Perhaps contributing were her dismay at Stalin’s policies and the Ukraine situation and deep disgust at the appointment of Beria who she considered vile. Stalin was deeply shaken by her death. He felt Nadya had abandoned and humiliated him. Kaganovich noted, “Stalin changed.” While Stalin was already vindictive and paranoid; some believe the impact of Nadya’s death on Stalin led to the Terror. 1933 saw a good harvest. Vanished people and villages were soon forgotten.

1934 was a decisive year. Kirov, Stalin’s close longtime friend, the boss of Leningrad and intimate of all the leadership, was assassinated. It looked like an inside job. Stalin was quick, too quick, to assign responsibility listing Party members to be investigated. Mikoyan and Khrushchev later said they thought Stalin planned it, but it was inconceivable at the time. Regardless Stalin seized the opportunity to replace those he did not trust with those he did. He immediately issued the first December Law with which Stalin could exercise total power. In December, 6,501 were shot including the accused conspirators and their innocent families. In the next three years the Law would be used to execute or commit to labor camps over two million people. Bolsheviks, not just resisters, would now be readily arrested and executed. Stalin’s paranoia, perhaps exacerbated by his loneliness following Nadya’s death, was running wild. He had been enamored with Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives in which Hitler consolidated power executing fellow Nazi’s including longtime friend Ernst Rohm. The comfortable days of the Kremlin elite were over.

In 1935 Stalin turned on another close longtime friend from his inner circle, Yenukidze, Nadya’s godfather. He had been the first official to see Nadya dead, while Stalin slept off a night drinking. In a pattern that would be repeated with many others, he was falsely accused of harboring terrorists and verbally attacked by Stalin surrogates then forced to write a “Correction of Errors”. Yenukidze was sent away to run a remote sanatorium. Stalin would have him executed two years later.

1936 saw the first of the great show trials. Stalin reopened the Kirov case framing two longtime Bolshevik leaders who had been close associates of Lenin. In return for confessions Stalin promised them they would not be executed. They dutifully played their parts at the trial. Everything was carefully orchestrated to garner public support. Then Stalin had them shot. Stalin relished the humiliation of his enemies. Stalin now viewed himself as a Tsar. Stalin had put Yezhov in charge of the Kirov investigation which had been used exactly as Stalin directed to eliminate enemies. Now Stalin put him in charge of the NKVD, the successor to the OGPU. On the side, Beria would secretly poison enemies for Stalin, including Lakoba, a longtime intimate member of Stalin’s circle. His death was, as usual in these cases, ascribed to natural causes.

In 1937 Stalin cleaned house fully unleashing the Terror. Thousands of Party officials and their families were deemed enemies of the people and Trotskyites. They were executed or sent to slave labor. This included high ranking longtime close friends of Stalin such as Bukharin who was shot, his wife sent to slave labor. Sergo, another close Stalin friend, took the easy way out committing suicide. When Stalin took out his enemies so were all connected to them: friends, lovers, protégés as well as family. Torture was regularly used. Stalin had Yezhov clean out the NKVD arresting thousands. Next Stalin eliminated the Red Army generals and even the judges that convicted them. By November 1938 over 40,000 army officers had been arrested. Stalin was now an absolute dictator.

In July, 1937 Stalin through Yezhov unleashed the Terror on the entire country. Districts were assigned quotas for executions and arrests and told to weed out “the most hostile anti-Soviet elements” “to finish off once and for all” enemies and of course their families and associates. As regions fulfilled their quotas they received, even asked for larger quotas. Poles and Germans were particularly targeted. Stalin also included “5 of the 15 Politburo members, 98 of the 139 Central Committee members and 1,108 of 1, 966 delegates from the Seventeenth Congress.” Anyone Stalin knew who he perceived could ever potentially turn against him was arrested or shot. In total 1.5 million were arrested and 700,000 thousand shot. Stalin believed it better to kill innocent people than miss an enemy. Yezhov spared no effort or potential enemies to fulfill Stalin’s wishes, personally working nights to torture prisoners himself. Stalin’s intimates Molotov and Kaganavich fully supported the Terror providing Yezhov their own lists of enemies, as did Yezhov’s own close friends Malenkov and Khrushchev. Yet all these men realized they could be arrested anytime. Only Stalin was truly safe. And in 1938 Stalin effectively replaced Yezhov with the sadistic Beria. Yezhov had become increasingly erratic drinking heavily. Stalin had him arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940.

By 1939, Stalin realized the purge needed to be scaled back. Europe was on the verge of war. In August, Stalin made a deal with Hitler to buy time figuring mistakenly that France and Britain would keep Germany busy. As part of the bargain Stalin got the Baltic States and Eastern Poland. In Poland true to form Stalin deported priests, officials, professionals, intellectuals, anyone who might oppose him – a total of 1.17 million by 1940, 10 percent of the population. Thirty percent would die the following year. Included were 26,000 Polish officer prisoners Stalin executed. In the Baltics 170,000 were deported or killed. At home Stalin’s paranoia fell on his associates’ wives. He had many eliminated, even the wife of his loyal assistant Poskrebyshev. Poskrebyshev, who Stalin trusted and liked, was beside himself with grief but Stalin told him, “Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife.” Beria was doing the dirty work in between his nights torturing inmates at Lubianka.

After France fell so quickly Stalin feared Hitler would attack. His spies confirmed plans for Operation Barbarossa in December 1940. Despite excellent intelligence Stalin believed he could delay Hitler. As attack became more imminent Stalin became increasingly dysfunctional denying intelligence reports and threatening those that told him the truth and overruling his generals. Many of his best generals had already been killed in the purge. His judgement about those remaining was often poor. He had generals arguing over whether tanks or horse drawn cannon were superior. Russia was unprepared in every way. An NKVD engineered overthrow of a pro German Yugoslav government did delay Hitler a month which would prove to be important.

When Russia was attacked in June 1941, Stalin became despondent. But Politburo members and associates realized without Stalin, people would lose faith. Only Stalin could rally the people. They snapped him out of it and got him back in charge. The Russian armies quickly folded losing most of their equipment and men. Soon the Germans were at the entrance to Leningrad. Then Stalin found the right general, Zhukov, who had been dismissed as Chief of Staff for giving Stalin advice he didn’t want to hear. In September, Stalin sent the professional and ruthless Zhukov to save Leningrad, which he miraculously did. Following Stalin’s orders, Zhukov burned down any populated area he could that the Nazi’s had captured. The Nazi’s lost too many men for Hitler, who decided to lay siege, starve the city and send the troops to take Moscow. In November Stalin recalled Zhukov to Moscow to lead the defense. Again miraculously with just 90,000 remaining troops Zhukov held off the Nazis. Soon Russian troops recalled from Asia began arriving to bolster Zhukov’s army.

In 1942, the Soviet army again suffered from Stalin’s inept micromanagement as it was eviscerated by the Nazi’s in the south leading to the decisive battle of Stalingrad starting in August. That same month Churchill visited Stalin in Moscow. Stalin wanted a second front, Churchill simply a reliable ally. Stalin showed both sides of himself. After leading with a terse confrontational stance, Stalin turned on the charm reversing Churchill’s initial anger and leaving him with a good impression. But Stalin needed more than charm against the Nazis in Stalingrad. The fear of losing this city and the war caused Stalin, the Supreme Commander, to stop being an amateur general. He made Zhukov Deputy Supreme Commander and sent him to Stalingrad. Zhukov returned as the Russians barely held on. He and Vasilevsky, Chief of Staff, presented to Stalin Operation Uranus, the plan that would win the battle. In November both Stalin and Hitler were confident of victory in Stalingrad and both publicly predicted it to their people. For once Stalin was right.

In October Stalin had returned command to his generals. But Beria and the NKVD enforced Party discipline ensuring no one in the military stepped out of line. Beria used the Gulag’s 1.7 million slave laborers to make Stalin’s weapons. Almost a million of these died during the war. In preparation for the battle of Kursk, the world’s greatest tank battle, Beria’s 300,000 slave laborers dug an impenetrable 3,000 miles of trenches. As Zhukov’s plan unfolded one million Russians and 3,000 tanks met 900,000 Germans and 2,700 tanks head on. The Russian victory at Kursk sealed the German’s fate at Stalingrad and Hitler’s in the war.

As 1942 ended fresh with victories and a commitment to open a second front after meeting FDR and Churchill in Tehran, Stalin returned to his old heavy drinking overconfident self. Already the war had cost Russia 26 million dead and an equal number homeless. Many were starving and nationalist movements began uprisings. Stalin returned to form answering with mass deportations of suspect ethnic groups. Beria arrested almost a million in 1943 and many more in 1944. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died, many starving, deported to the Eastern provinces. Corruption was rampant in Soviet leadership including the military and secret police. Germany and conquered territories were extensively looted. The elite piled up treasures while Soviet citizens and soldiers starved, over 800,000 in 1946 and 1947. Stalin made Khrushchev the fall guy for the famine, demoting him

After the war Stalin added a big belly to his big head putting on much weight with constant gluttonous dinners at which he and his fellow Politburo members and other intimates were always totally drunk. In 1945 he had a heart attack. He lost some of his sharpness but none of his paranoia. Soon he turned sour on the Four, the other primary Politburo members: Mikoyan, Molotov, Malenkov, and Beria. He replaced Beria as head of the secret police and sent Malenkov packing to central Asia. He also thought the generals too big for their britches, demoting many including the war hero Zhukov. In 1949 he turned on the “Leningraders”, eliminating party members he feared were trying to build a Russian party at the expense of the Soviet one. Keep in mind Stalin was Georgian, not Russian. Yeltsin would years later use a “Leningrader” strategy to undermine Gorbachev.

In late 1947 Stalin began targeting Jews. This became an extensive anti-Semitic campaign removing prominent Jews from positions of power. To Molotov’s dismay even his beloved Jewish wife Polina was arrested. She had been friends with Stalin and Nadya since her 1921 marriage to Molotov, for years Stalin’s closest ally. Stalin now considered her snobbish and she had a businessman brother in America. She was sacked from her government position, forced to divorce Molotov and exiled to the East. Many others were arrested or killed. Stalin did not trust anyone he thought elitist and that included many Jews who were called “cosmopolitans.” He was angry that Israel, which he had hoped would be a Russian client, turned towards America, seeing that as a sign of divided loyalty of Soviet Jews. In 1950 the campaign was still in full swing as even lower management level Jews were sacked. The Gulags were busting full at 2.6 million. Stalin also arrested many thousands of Mingrelians, an ethnic group in Georgia. This was also a threat against Beria, who was Mingrelian.

Abakumov had replaced Beria as head of the MGB (new name for NKGB which had been split from the NKVD). He was now betrayed by one of his assistants just as had the secret police chiefs before him (Yezhov and Beria). Stalin had decided Abakumov was going soft on Stalin’s latest targets, doctors (many were Jewish). Abakumov was arrested, tortured and eventually shot. He was replaced by Ignatiev, who at Stalin’s direction mercilessly tortured his victims using medical instruments on the doctors. When progress was slow Stalin excoriated Ignatiev, “Beat them until they confess! Beat, beat, and beat again. Put them in chains, grind them into powder.” Stalin had his own longtime family doctor arrested and tortured. By 1950 Stalin suffered terribly from arthritis, cardiovascular disease and the beginning of dementia, but his instincts and modus operandi had not changed.

In December 1952 Stalin denounced Molotov and Mikoyan at a Party Congress excluding them from the Politburo. He did not want any of his old cronies to be his successor. The new Four (key Politburo members Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin) all felt threatened as Stalin turned on his old associates. In March 1953 Stalin had a cerebral hemorrhage. He died days later. The best doctors including his own were unavailable as they were being interrogated in Lubianka. Amazingly, many of his associates who had been terrified of him shed tears at his death. All in all Stalin was responsible for killing 20 million and deporting 28 million with 18 million of those sent to the Gulags.

[Dmitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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 from Russia in the early 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 elder historians Robert Conquest and Robert Service, he precedes his later ‘Young Stalin’ 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 Khrushchev 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 workers 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. Beria 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 prison; there was no one now 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 its uses; the Motherland was not yet prepared for war. The old guard preferred cannons to rockets and horses to tanks; the Wehrmacht was 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 the road to Stalingrad Khrushchev lost a million men, thousands of tanks and aircraft. Stalin knew he needed to call in the professionals, and General Zhukov was reinstated to his command. Later the Red Army raped and pillaged their way to Berlin while 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. Khrushchev, fallen from favor for his failed fighting and famine in Ukraine, was able to advance himself after Stalin's death.

Stalinism
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 to Mao, seen as a new emperor residing within the Forbidden City and Son of Heaven to the Middle Kingdom. We could also compare the propaganda and regalia of Hitler's Aryan ruse. The objectives were similar, personality cults celebrated with messianic fervor by the masses. Although attempted, religion was not wiped out or replaced.

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 could be your best bet. It is better to experience these things vicariously than to live through them. Although 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, that Mao was Stalin's most diligent student. His personal style, struggle sessions and purges were all but identical. If the lessons haven't been learned there will be more horror to come.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chilling, very readable account of Stalin and his oppressive, paranoid and murder plot filled regime. The way he managed to hold onto power in a cutthroat environment of his own making is vividly depicted by the author
Death solves all problems

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar starts off quaint enough with top Soviets all living close and cosy in palaces around the Kremlin. Simon Sebag Montefiore zooms into the death of the wife of Stalin, Nadia, who met him when she was 17 and 39. She had a history of psychiatric problems, including frequent cures in Berlin. Her death in the narrative of Montefiore unmoored the despot. In a sense this encapsulates the style of the author quite well. He pays a lot of attention to the personal, speculates based on that, making this a lively account instead of very academical work in feel.

Charm coupled to terror is a way Stalin is described, him being mercurial and intense and with his patronage being fully dependent on (perceived) loyalty. Molotov, whose name means hammer is a good example, and is one of the few high ranking soviets surviving the long reign of Stalin.
Any doubt was treason, the price of progress is death and in many ways the management style applied reminds me of corporate early 21st century frauds, where top brass only value specific outcomes, regardless of the cost. Fraud, enormous collateral damage and human costs follow from this approach. In other ways Stalin is approach is similar to what we would today see as a benevolent leader: never speaking first during Politburo meetings to make sure everyone give their opinions is an example that comes to mind.

It is clear that letters where the mails and Whatsapp of the time, with the archives showing that around 20% of them talk about health of various politburo members and 10% about holiday plans.
Paranoia being vigilance in the regime is definitely exemplified by the dictator himself, who never seems to forget any grudges or scores to settle.
Crisis leads to consolidation of power and opportunities to power grap, playing into the narrative of needing a strongman as leader.
In 1935, in this push to stability, over 1 million people are in the Gulags, while the top brass takes 2 months summer holidays in Crimea or Sotsji.

Starving Ukraine, together with the WW II scenes, is most harrowing in a book full of disregard for the human costs. Over 4 to 5 million people died, maybe even 10 million dead, to break the back of the peasants resistance to the party ostentatiously representing them. Stalin mentioned to Churchill that this period in the 1930s was worse for him than the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
The ends justify the means, you cant make an omelette without breaking eggs other high ranking party members remark. A veritable carousel of up- and coming men and people who fall out of favour is another constant of the book. Ruthlessness and lack of moral to achieve goals is a key feature to gain notice and promotions. One remarks: A revolution without firing squads is meaningless. The 25.000 slave laborers dying in the construction of the White Sea canal seems a minor case in point of this mantra.

At time I feel the author doesn't quite manage to capture the gravitas or personal power of the main character, feline as Stalin’s moniker comes back a bit too much, but how someone who is not necessarily very well in speeches and charming only when need be, can beguile his way to absolute power is something that I would have liked a bit deeper dive into.

Hitlers Night of the Long Knife formed an inspiration to Stalin his purge of the party, with Bolsheviks seeing justice as a political instrument. In one December before WW II over 6.500 people are executed in response to a murder on the secretary of the Central Committee.
His son Vasilly blackmailing teachers with suicide threats is a rare personal touch in this dehumanising number of victims, showing that managing once private life is at time harder than terrorising a nation to done one's bidding.

Stalin called tsars Nicolas II, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great and especially Ivan the Terrible as his examples, and at the same time executions of 12 year olds were approved in 1935.
Those without blind faith are to die one memo reads in respect to the purge of the party.
Another maxim written down was: Better that ten innocent people would suffer than that one spy got away. When you chop wood, chips fly.

Guilty of knowing too much and living too well were assessments for which convenient ideological crimes were easily enough found.
In the end over 40.000 commanders of the Red Army were arrested as part of the late 1930’s purge.
There were quotas of deaths per rank per province and 760.000 arrests, better too much than too little, in an effort of regional authorities to show their zeal.
In other figures, over 36.000 railway workers arrested and prosecuted and 68.000 people alone in Leningrad. One cannot stop to wonder if such a fervour was taken to rearmament, German style, how many Russian lives would have been spared later.

To the complete destruction of our enemies and their kin was a toast of Stalin during this terror, no doubt dampening the hearts of hears of some of the dinner party attendees who suspected to be under investigation.
Party members torturing their own woman and beating dead their own teenage children to illustrate their loyalty are other terrifying, unimaginable examples. Governors of regions thought They had to kill a lot to safe a few, generously meeting their death quotas just to be able to spare a few favoured men. Again, the human responses and politics involved in these purges remind me of corporate layoffs and how departments interact with each other based on ukases of Head Office. Just in our corporate world millions of currency are at stakes instead of millions of life.

The purges can be seen as a way to gain political flexibility, enabling the incredible pact with Germany, without apparent any opposition from the elite of the Communist Party.
The Great Patriotic War leads over 1.7m Poles deported from Soviet occupied Poland in 1939. Finland initially is successful with "only" 48.000 Finnish dead versus 125.000 Russian deaths, before being annexed. In the newly acquired territories terror is one of the first export products to familiarise the population to Soviet rule: 250 shootings of Polish prisoners of war per day for more than a month is an example of how the Russians broke the intelligentsia and anyone they suspected of being able to oppose them.

Only 11 days after signing order Barbarossa the plan was known by the USSR spies, but even a day before the invasion, when several communist defectors notified the USSR of the intentions of Germany, they were shot by the Bolsheviks rather than that it lead to a full mobilisation.
The German invasion happened 129 years after the day that Napoleon invaded Russia, and ended just as catastrophic.
Initial response to the attack showed some consternation and fragility: Stalin is recorded to have said: Lenin founded our state and we fucked it up

Draconian measures, including the prosecution of families of captured Soviet soldiers were enacted to keep internal morale high. Over 425.000 Soviet soldiers were captured in the fall of Kiev.
Only after Eastern troops were redeployed by Stalin from the Japanese front to protect Moscow, and with winter setting in, the tide starts to turn.
More than 900.000 slave laborers, supervised by the secret services, died during the Second World War II.

After the war the position of Stalin is stronger than ever, propelled by meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt as one of the most important persons in the world. Over 5.6 million roubles paid for the festivities at the Bolshoi Theater for the 70th birthday of Stalin.
One of the more bizarre anecdotes is a trade minister was sacked and shipping personnel arrested for unripe bananas at the end of the 1940’s, showing the all pervasive impact the Party and Stalin in particular had on the day-to-day life of Russians.
Mao at least giving Stalin some pushback, but with the communist dictators still forming a tepid alliance.

Despite recognizing Israel first, Stalin started after the war to purge jews from his government
Stalin his own doctor, also a jew, was being tortured because he had suggested to take rest.
This explains no medical help was foredooming after his stroke in a summer residence.

A monumental and very readable book on someone who had a profound impact on the 20th century. I learned a lot from reading this book, and at times was appalled and shocked.

[Harry Rutherford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a biography of Stalin, focussed on his domestic life and the tightly-knit group of people around him: his own family, and politicians, bodyguards, and their families.

As a piece of history, it's very impressive. It's clearly the result of a huge amount of research by Montefiore: he seems to have personally interviewed just about every living relative of the major figures, quite apart from the endless reading of archives and memoirs that must have been involved. As a casual reader I found it slightly hard going at times. I didn't do it any favours by largely reading it in bed at night, but even allowing for that, I found it hard to keep track of all the people involved. I found I was having difficulty remembering which was which even of the most important figures, like Molotov, Mikoyan and Malenkov.

I don't know if that's an inevitable result of a book with quite so many people in it — It's not a subject I've read about before, and all the unfamiliar Russian names didn't help — or if it's my fault for reading it while drowsy, or if there's more Montefiore could have done to fix the various people in my mind. I didn't find I got much sense of their various personalities that would have helped me keep them separate. Still, what I did get was a strong sense of Stalin himself, and his trajectory from a charming (though ruthless) young man living an almost campus lifestyle at the Kremlin, surrounded by the young families of his colleagues, to a sickly, garrulous old despot wandering nomadically from dacha to dacha and living in a vortex of terror and awe.

But even a sense of what Stalin was like to live and work with doesn't get you much closer to understanding his motivations and the motivations of people around him. Was it just about power or did he believe to the end that he was acting in the interests of Russia and the party? The inner clique around Stalin clearly knew at some level that all the denunciations and show trials were arbitrary and could attach to anyone: they saw the process happen over and over again. And when colleagues they had known for years confessed to ludicrously unlikely accusations, they surely can't have believed it. But the things they said and wrote suggest that at the same time they sort of did believe it, and remained theoretically committed to the ideology to the end. It made me inclined to reread 1984, because the concept of 'doublethink' is so startlingly apt.

In some ways the Stalinist purges are even more incomprehensible than the Holocaust. The Holocaust at least has a kind of simple central narrative: an attempt to exterminate the Jews. It fits into a thousand year history of European anti-Semitism as well as a broader human history of racism and genocide. The purges don't offer any kind of similarly clear story: at different times they focussed on different things. It might be a whole social class, a profession, an ethnicity, or it might start with one or two individuals that Stalin was suspicious of and spread out through their colleagues and families to take in hundreds of people. Targets included kulaks, engineers, doctors, army officers, Poles, Jews, ethnic Germans, Chechens, Estonians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Koreans: in fact any ethnic minority that could provide a possible focus for dissent. The total number of deaths, including not just those executed but those who died in slave labour camps or famine, is disputed; but 20 million is apprently a plausible ballpark figure.

At one stage Stalin was setting two quotas for the different regions: the number to be shot and the number to be arrested. These numbers were in the tens or hundreds of thousands, but the regions were soon writing back and requesting that their quotas be extended — out of ideological zeal? In an attempt to demonstrate their loyalty? Or just because these things have a momentum of their own?

It's a staggering story and despite the slight reservations I expressed earlier, this is a very impressive book.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stupendous biography and Montefiore really does keep his focus on the fascinating figure of Stalin himself, rather than stealthily turning this into a more generalised history of Soviet Russia as historical biographies are wont to do. And what a complex, contradictory man Stalin is!

It's easy to write him off as monstrous (and many of the things he does certainly more than warrant the epithet) but he's also all too human: his love for his second wife, Nadya, whom he never seems to stop mourning; his protective and close relationship with his daughter Svetlana even when she goes through her difficult adolescent phase (and there's a woman about whom I'd love to know more - in love with Beria?!); his romping with the Bolshevik children of his close circle; the occasion during the battle for Stalingrad when he personally phones the chiefs of tobacco factories to make sure that fighters in the city are sent cigarettes...

SSM has scoured the archives and interviewed everyone, it seems, he can find who knew or met Stalin making this dense and deep but never hard to follow. And it's the personal touches that made this for me: it's Stalin the man in all his complexities who comes to life off the page. He's such a towering personality that at the end, as he lies dying, even the people he'd had imprisoned, tortured, or who had lost beloved family members, weep for the loss of this political giant.

And I missed him, too, as this came to an end, however counter-intuitive, even disturbing that may sound. It's an immense feat, that SSM pulls off, to convey all the charisma and magnetism of the man, the idealistic visions of his Bolshevik youth and the jaw-dropping corruption and horrors that followed, the complicated melding of generosity and breadth of spirit with the acute paranoia and distrust that led to the Great Terror which never really stopped.

And it's the little things that linger: Stalin the autodidact who, after punishing 16 hour days, read voraciously: Dickens, Zola, Balzac; Stalin in one of his last visits sitting a little Georgian girl on his knee and telling her to choose whatever she wants from the sweet shop; Stalin laughing uproariously while plying his friends with Georgian food and drink and playing records on the gramophone for them to dance to... And all the while, the death lists multiply, the quotas for killing get ever larger, and Ukraine starves. What a mystery man is!

(Listened to audio April 25-May 5 2020)

[Sweetwilliam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yagoda told his interrogators that “you can put me down in your report to Stalin that there must be a God after all. From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude for my faithful service; from God, I deserved the most severe punishment for having violated his commandments thousands of times. Now look where I am [Lubyanka prison] and judge for yourself: is there a God or not?”
These are the words of Yagoda, the first of several KGB chiefs that Stalin had arrested, tortured, and executed.

During the period of glasnost, Montefiore used the Russian archives and interviews with survivors to paint a picture of arguably the most ruthless dictator and mass murder that the world has ever known. I was spellbound by the pages of this book. I literally couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t wait to get to the next chapter.

Is there anything good to say about Stalin? He was well read and probably the most well-read Tsar that the Russian people had ever known. He occasionally sent a few rubbles to old friends that he knew before the Revolution. Did I mention that he was well read?

Now the bad: The war on the peasantry of the Ukraine, the constant purges within the government that included his closest and most loyal associates their wives, families, extended families, protégés, friends, lovers etc, the purges in the military before, during, and after the war, the pogroms against the Jews etc. Stalin killed everybody, including a good part of his wife’s family and I am still trying to understand why. According to Stalin, it is better to kill thousands of innocent people than to miss a single enemy of the state (i.e. him).

In WWII, Stalin is given credit for defeating the Nazis. From the data, one can argue that the Germans were defeated in spite of Stalin. Read how Stalin purges the highest echelon of the Soviet military of 90% of the Marshalls, Commanders, and Corp Commanders and arrests 40,000 officers just prior to WWII. During the war his general order No 270 resulted in the condemnation of nearly a million men and the execution of nearly 15 divisions. He promoted an imbecile to Marshal and killed the head of the Air Force. He was the best weapon the Germans had. The Soviets won in spite of Joseph Stalin who was conducting two wars: one against the Germans and the other against his own people.

Eventually, Joseph Vassiniovitch does himself in by instituting a pogrom on Jewish intelligentsia that led to the arrest and interrogation of his own physician and the most competent medical minds in the Soviet Union; the only people that could have saved him. Good riddance.

This book should be mandatory reading for anyone attending, teaching, or administering at a university within the free world. The intelligentsia at the Universities are often the last bastion of communism. When you surrender complete control of your personal life and freedoms and empower a central government so that they can better take care of the populace, you are setting the conditions for another Joseph Stalin to grab power. Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Kim Jung IL, Castro and various jungle and desert Stalin’s from the Soviet Union in 1917 to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2017, there is not one example of Communism benefiting anyone but the leader at the top of the power pyramid.

This book is another testament to communism: society’s cancer.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers.

Christmas time is a tricky time for my friends and relatives. Only the intrepid make moves to buy books, films and music without my preapproval. My friend Ed bought me a book, a memoir, which I had previously found for a quarter and considered myself cheated at that price. I returned his book and selected this among the meager offerings at the local independent book store; I should qualify that the independent stores across the river are not provincial nor meager but the one here is, despite my buying many books upon their opening, they or my town lack vision: I'd assume its an admixture of such. I went home with this biography and sort of tumbled into its depths. We had wicked a storm a few days later and I used the time off work to complete such, iced-over streets and sidewalks lent the reading a theatric detail. The next Christmas I bought my dad a copy which I remain unclear as to whether he perused: he's funny that way. I then bought Young Stalin for myself in paperback but haven't approached such in a meaningful way.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book aptly describes what it is like to have an extremely paranoid person in leadership. Enemies could be close by or far away in another country. Using the dictums of Marxist-Leninist philosophy enemies were fabricated from individuals in government (the infamous Trotsky is but one example) to whole groups (kulaks, army officers, and ethnic groups in the U.S.S.R., and at the end of Stalin’s life Jews and doctors). No one felt safe under Stalin’s rule – all could be suspects, and suspect others.

But the strength of this book is how it shows Stalin as a human being; too often books on tyrannical dictators dehumanize them as monsters and evil incarnate. Stalin could show affection to those around him and bestowed favours on past friends. He could charm those in his inner circle. Stalin was detailed, hands-on, and had a prodigious memory. He also knew that the Soviet people wanted strong leadership with the necessary icons. He provided that – more so during the Second World War. His cult exists to this day in Russia. To me it is amazing that some of those imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, would still ask Stalin for forgiveness upon release.

Reading this book makes one realize that Stalin was just another Czar masquerading under communist ideology. He and his oligarchy had lavish homes spread out across the Soviet Union from Moscow to Sochi. For many years, while millions were starving from famine brought on by forced collectivization, the Soviet Party leadership were accumulating their wealth and holding lavish parties. They used the same techniques as the Czar’s – a police state and exile to the Gulag. But the Soviet economy was industrialized and educational levels upgraded. This was all Machiavellian – any means justified the end.

Page 38 (my book)

The Bolsheviks could storm any fortress. Any doubt was treason. Death was the price of progress...Hence they cultivated hardness, the Bolshevik virtue.


Page 76

Bolshevism may not have been a religion, but it was close enough,...The “sword-bearers” had to believe with Messianic faith, to act with the correct ruthlessness, and to convince others they were right to do so... a systematic amorality. This religion, or science, as it was modestly called invests a man with godlike authority. All agreed on the superiority of the new creed that promised heaven on earth instead of other world rewards.


As per the title of the book the emphasis is on Stalin and his entourage – the oligarchs in his inner circle. At times this gives the book a rather gossipy feel – too much of “he said/she said” with accompanying dialogue. The revolving characters become confusing. I did find the World War II years the most interesting. The post-war years mention nothing on the ethnic cleansing that went on in Poland, Ukraine, and Belorussia – costing thousands of lives. Little is mentioned on how Stalin manipulated and bullied his satellite countries (Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria...). The footnotes are messy.

We still come away with an intimate and devastating portrait of one the twentieth century’s most brutal dictatorships. As historians have mentioned Stalin declared war on his own country and was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Red Tsar, The Autocrat, The Dictator

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore is excellent. I throughly enjoyed this ultimate analysis into how Stalin ran Russia from the top. The books follows a broad chronological order following on from Montefiore’s other great book Young Stalin. The book is thematic in places and focuses on shows the personality of Stalin, of those around him and how this effected the government of history’s strange experiment with the worlds largest country. Do you need to be close to Stalin? Do you need to be good at what you do? Successful? A victorious general? A loyal party member? A loving husband? Intelligent? Even a Stalinist? The answer is no one knows, as this can save you and equally break you. He knows you or he doesn’t, he will still sign your death lists. But he might also remember you and Dave you. Members of the party or the Politburo couldn’t work it out, and navigated these hostile waters for so long that it drove some mad. Those like Molotov who survived, are not greats or especially skilled or close to the Man of Steel but simply were going to get destroyed one day and simply our lived him.

The cast of characters, misfits and creeps who formed the Bolsheviks are so interesting, with their intrigue and nuances I’m not sure many authors could write this tale. If you did it would be written off as fantasy. Too far fetched.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is excellently written as we would expect from one of the greatest historians alive. I particularly the questions asked, such as was Stalin purposely left when he had his stroke? Was the murder of his best friend Kirov murdered by him? Was he planing to get rid of all the old Bolsheviks to eradicate any sense of realistic succession?

There is a lot to be said about Stalin and I find him preferable to Lenin. At least Stalin had humour, Stalin is more human. He romanced woman, loved films and practical jokes. There is more to his character then the politically obsession mass murderer. Which of course he was unquestionably was also. He read veraciously and worked with tireless energy. An extremely intelligent man. But he was also evil. To spend so much time with such a person in this context was easy, usually such a person I would avoid. But Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is too good. History and analysis at its best.

[Tom LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book. This long and most intimate portrait of the life inside Stalin’s close circle is as brilliant and well-researched as it is often disturbing and chilling.

The years covered go from 1932, when Stalin’s troubled wife committed suicide, to the end of his life in 1953.

You will feel the intensity of Stalin’s gaze and his presence through these pages almost as a physical sensation.

Through many testimonies and letters (many of them only recently made available) Montefiore depicts Joseph Stalin as a complex figure with selective empathy toward family and close allies, a computer-like memory, and a criminal ruthlessness.

During WWII, Stalin terrorized the best Russian composers into writing a new anthem (that was his MO whenever he needed something done) and in my opinion, the result of that process is the most powerful national anthem there is, at least in terms of the music score. Here is the link to the original version, with the old lyrics, that mention Stalin a couple of times: https://youtu.be/K3kBmGMHyxU

Montefiore describes Stalin’s personality as extremely sly, watchful, and feline-like: a master of charm, quiet menace, and emotional restraint, blending Georgian warmth with obsessive paranoia.

As a christian, I do not believe that any human being is “born evil”. In fact, calling someone “evil” is in itself a rather shallow statement. I remember George W. Bush using the expression multiple times in 2001, and even if I understand that politics always needs to dumb reality down, I still found it so simplistic and cartoonish, even when used to define terrorist organizations.

All this to say that when you read the biography of a man that popular culture has been calling “evil” for decades, you might sometimes be surprised to find out that he was a human being with very human emotions, passions and weaknesses.

This is especially true when talking about political leaders, who by definition need to be able to manage relationships and people.

Additionally, Stalin didn’t kill “despite” his ideology. He killed “because” his ideology removed every moral obstacle to killing. That’s why he never expressed any regret or sense of guilt for causing the death of millions of people, not only in war but especially before the war, among his own people.

People often lump Stalin and Hitler together, but we know their psychological motives were very different.

Hitler’s violence was emotional, mythic, and deeply personal. He viewed history as a racial struggle in which certain groups (Jews, Roma, Slavs, and others) were not merely enemies but cosmic embodiments of evil. Extermination, in his mind, was not just necessary but a moral duty, an act of purification aimed at cleansing the world of corruption. His hatred was fanatical and sincere, driven by obsession and rage.

Hitler truly despised his victims and saw their destruction as a form of righteousness.

Stalin’s violence, by contrast, was cold, administrative, and instrumental. Almost like the violence of a teenage boy who is playing a strategy videogame and slaughtering millions of “virtual people” to win the game.

He conceived history not as a racial but as a class struggle, where enemies were structural categories rather than particular peoples, and individuals within those categories were interchangeable.

Stalin did not need to hate anyone personally. Once someone was labeled a “kulak” or an “enemy of the people,” they were already condemned in principle. His killing was not about cleansing but about control—violence as a means to dominate, to preempt, and to maintain absolute power, continuing the bureaucratic terror that had defined Bolshevik rule since Lenin’s rise.

Having said all this, reading this book under a spiritual lens, it obviously becomes even darker than what it might normally be.

And not simply in the sense that Stalin’s biography provides us with a brilliant example of “what not to do - ever” with the life that you’re given.

Let me explain: if you look at Stalin’s life from a purely “worldly” point of view, you see the story of an exceptionally clever and strong man who ascended to unimaginable heights of power, won almost everything that he could win, and died old, after a lifetime of victory and success.

Under a certain modern alpha-male, testosterone-consuming, Joe-Rogan-fan, success-above-all-else perspective, Joseph Stalin was “the man”.

I’m using “worldly” in the biblical sense here. The “world” is where we christians find ourselves, but not what we ultimately belong to, and we have to constantly push against it if we want to make any forward steps in our spiritual path, if we want to grow towards freedom, happiness and sainthood.

Stalin’s success is exactly the type of success that the Devil promised Jesus during His retreat in the desert. After showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor from a high mountain, Satan says, “All this I will give you, if you will bow down and worship me”.

The Devil is the “Prince of this world” for good reasons: he can deliver riches and success in unimaginable quantity, as long as you give him your soul. Stalin knew how to win in the world, according to the brutal rules of the world: “Death solves all problems, no man, no problem” was a favorite maxim of his.

And do you know what? Pragmatically, he was 100% right. It’s true: there is no more efficient solution in this world than eliminating your opponents from the face of the Earth.

The eternal problem of disagreements among people within the same country or community DOES have a very simple solution: murder and terror. The communist / socialist solution, thoroughly adopted by Lenin and then amplified by Stalin, was to murder anyone who disagreed with them.

Once the person who disagrees is dead, that problem is irrevocably resolved.

This is a dark but pretty ancient and effective solution that some of us may have even fantasized about — anyone who’s attended an HOA meeting knows immediately what I’m talking about.

As I said — Stalin killed because of his ideology. The moment an ideology elevates a collective identity above individual human dignity, it becomes a blueprint for tragedy. Communism, by design, elevated one class of people above all the others.

The moment an ideology says: “This group represents history / virtue / progress. That group represents obstruction / backwardness / evil”, you have crossed a threshold that takes you inevitably down a murderous spiral.

Why? Because individuals are no longer judged by their actions. Guilt becomes ontological, not behavioral. Violence becomes preventive, not punitive. In Marxist-Leninist terms:
�� bourgeois = enemy
• kulak = enemy
• “class consciousness” overrides individuality

Once that happens, killing becomes a hygienic operation, not an immoral or a criminal one.

Bringing this back to the christian framework: St. Paul already stated in very clear terms that doing evil things while seeking some higher good is never justified (“Why not say, as some slanderously claim that we say, “Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is deserved!”).

The poet Robert Hayden had it right: “We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.”

Plus, it’s not like this ideal “higher good” of the Bolshevics was anywhere to be seen. “To make an omelette, you have to break some eggs”, they used to say to justify their arrests and murders. The witty George Orwell wrote in an article: “I see they’re breaking many eggs, but… where are the omelettes?”.

The tragic irony is that an ideology meant to end oppression created one of the worst dictatorships in history. Marxism claimed to liberate humanity from exploitation. But in practice, Lenin and Stalin erased individual moral worth, reduced people to functions, concentrated dictatorial power and replaced law with loyalty.

The result wasn’t “equality”. It was the most intrusive state in human history.

As the pigs write on the wall in Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

Marxism / communism is a system that is guaranteed to implode on itself, as it has done about 23 times in history.

The question: “why would intelligent people still support communism in 2025?” is a very important question to ask. The answer is complex, but in my opinion it has mainly to do with propaganda, ignorance, superficiality and lack of wisdom.

The argument that "true communism has not been implemented properly yet" is deeply anti-historical and intellectually weak because it dismisses the undeniable reality of a century of catastrophic failures.

Across 23 distinct governments and movements, from the Soviet Union to Cambodia, the implementation of communism has consistently yielded the same results: economic collapse, mass repression, and totalitarianism. This pattern suggests the failure is systemic and inherent to the ideology, not a mere coincidence or managerial error.

These are the lucky 5 surviving communist governments today:
China - fake communism. In reality, one-party dictatorship with full control over a capitalism-based economy.
North Korea - let’s not even comment.
Cuba - actual communism until a few years ago. A regime of despotic terror and indiscriminate assassinations. A human tragedy and an unmitigated disaster.
Laos and Vietnam - both fake communism. In reality, one-party dictatorship with full control over a capitalism-based economy.

The totalitarian outcomes are logical consequences of core principles: the abolition of private property eliminates the crucial economic signals (prices) needed for efficient resource allocation, while the establishment of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" always devolves into the absolute power of a single, unchecked party.

By granting the state a monopoly on violence and legitimacy to eliminate "class enemies," the ideology licenses unlimited state terror.

Ultimately, insisting on the theoretical purity of the ideal while ignoring the consistent, brutal historical evidence is a form of willful blindness, treating the ideology as an unfalsifiable dogma rather than a hypothesis that has been tested and resoundingly rejected by history, just like sewage.

We are all equal in front of God: rich and poor, young and old, tall and short, healthy and sick. He loves us all equally.

But this equality of worth, that Jesus taught us, should never be confused with a forced equality of material outcome, which is a profound and dangerous theoretical mistake.

[Manray9 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Montefiore's research is astounding. He had access to the Stalin archives, but also sought out the friends and family members of Khrushchev, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, all the Alliluyevs, Svanidzes and many others. I didn't know Svetlana Alliluyeva was still alive and living quietly in an unidentified location in the U.S. Midwest. It was almost 700 pages and I couldn't put it down.

[Jan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The blurbs on the cover of this book are over-the-top gushers of praise. Yes, the book contains detailed research, and a lot of new info on the personal side of Stalin. But it is written like a school-girl (or an old woman) gossiping breathlessly about all her closest friends.

- It is disorganized.
- The punctuation is a mystery. The author makes a statement, then adds a colon, then follows with a quote or another statement that either contradicts the first statement, or has nothing to do with it.
- The paragraphs have no unifying idea - they are just a collection of sentences in random order.
- The endnotes are a mess. Often, the endnote documents a quote that is not even in the paragraph in question, but in a completely different chapter.
- The author uses "perhaps," "must have," and "probably" so often that I doubt that the book is an accurate portrayal of Stalin's personal life.
- Even when he is not using the caveats above, he is making statements about the thought processes of the characters to which he has no access.

I got so impatient with the author's prose that I quit reading on page 327. I just could not get past the disconnect between the light, bantering, "insider" intimacy of the prose, and the gravity of what was happening to the people and the country.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so gruesome that I could barely read a chapter a day. Stalin's fifties are best described as specializing in ignoring truth. An ostrich with its head buried in the sand had nothing on Stalin. His incompetent management of World War II was truly awful, and his disloyalty and manipulation of friends and their families to their deaths was unbelievable. All in all, he personifies the boss no one wants to work for.

Credited with nearly 20 million deaths (I don't think that includes the soldiers lost through his mismanagement of the war), Stalin was most certainly a monster who thought history would ignore his depredations. Thanks to this book, we hopefully will not. I, for one, had no idea Stalin was as cruel as he was. Al Capone was a choirboy in comparison. Both may have been good to their families, but that does not mitigate their criminal tendencies towards murder and mayhem.

Now that I have read this book, I can now appreciate Ayn Rand more. Stalin tried to annihilate individualism and then could not understand why he had no one competent left to grow wheat, run factories, do research, etc. Ironically he was in the process of torturing and condemning to death the five greatest Jewish doctors in Russia when he had a stroke and was left to the incompetency of lesser doctors, which killed him. All I can say is, Yes! Serves him right!

I'd like to think the world is through producing people like Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Capone, Napoleon, etc. Unfortunately it appears that we are still producing them in Africa and South America and probably other places as well. Scary thought. Hopefully the internet will prevent them from hiding so long from the public eye.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The trouble with a really good book is that eventually you finish it. Even one that's 700 pages long. After that, your life is basically over. That's what's wrong with this one.

We learned precisely jack about Soviet history in school. Aside from the propaganda they ladled out, which was pretty short on recognizable facts. One is left educating oneself, and this is the best the TCL could do on the subject of "show trials" and "Great Terror." I still don't know enough about Russian history, evidently. This book glosses over Stalin's early career--who knew there was a Civil War after the Revolution?--and starts out in the mid-20's, just before he got started killing his 20,000,000 people.

Stalin and Co. had this interesting policy in 1931 or so of creating instant industry, sort of "just add water," by forcing the peasants to export all their grain to the west. So the peasants had to starve, be deported, or be shot. The Bolsheviks were really into death as a solution to many problems--"no man, no problem."

The Kremlin got into WWII through a wall of screeching denial, and for the life of me I can't see how the hell Germany lost the eastern front. The Soviet leadership approached their defense like guys trying to escape a flood by banging holes in the bottom of their boat and shooting at the rescue helicopter. Look at it: A reasonable wartime government encourages its population and military with posters, marching music, slogans, and other jingoistic propaganda. The Kremlin's idea of bucking up the troops was to terrorize anyone who looked a little bit chicken-hearted, plus their families. Case in point: The German army was descending on Moscow; the city was being bombed; there were 90,000 defenders, and what does Stalin do? He has more than 23,000 of them arrested for cowardice.

And yet Stalin was apparently personally charming, an enthusiastic scholar, a serious literary critic, and a fine singer who could have sung professionally. He was from Georgia; "Stalin" was his nom de guerre, or de revolution or whatever. In the early 1930's, all the Politburo families lived cosily together in flats in the Kremlin, had dinner parties, shared nannies, vacationed together in the Crimea. (Planning massacres.) After the war, things were different: Stalin really was more like a dictator, controlling things from his various dachas, ordering the magnates to all-night dinner parties where they were required to eat till they vomited and try to drink him under the table.

It's tempting to try to diagnose a man like Stalin. Was he a psychopath, an Antisocial Personality? He had some antisocial traits, like egregious criminal behavior and a taste for hearing the last words of those he had arrested, tortured and shot. But he was a loving father and a thoughtful friend. Unlike a true psychopath, he had a fine ability to think through consequences, to plan, to weigh alternatives. He could be gentle. No, he wasn't sick. He, along with others, entered into a system that was based on violence, devoted to violence; that believed in "no revolution without blood;" that made up enemies where there were none; that trusted lies; that rewarded sycophancy; that punished courage, honesty, and integrity.

The author relies on an incredible amount of basic research for this biography--interviews with Stalin's adopted son and the children of his associates, the newly published writings of his underlings, his own letters and those of his family, and histories from both East and West. One of the best things about this 700-page biography is that it is broken up into little short chapters, like this one.

[نیما اکبرخانی · Rating 5 out of 5]

فراتر از کتاب
از آن کتاب هایی بود که احتمالا برای مدت های طولانی در ذهن من باقی خواهد ماند ، کتابی که درس های بسیار زیادی داشت و سبب جذب پاره ای از حقایق ناخوشایند در قوه ی عاقله ی خواننده می شود که امکان مقایسه خودش با خیلی چیزها و مسائل را فراهم می کند
از آن کتاب هایست که سبب می شود آدم حتی در قرن بیست و یکم درک بسیار بهتری از مناسبات سیاسی و اجتماعی در هر جایی پیدا کند.
درست است که دیگر نه استالین هست ، نه سیستم مارکسیسم - لنینیستی و نه اتحاد جماهیر شوروی اما آدم ها هستند .
داستان استالین این بچه کفاش که پدرش الکلی بود و کتکش می زد ، داستان بچه ی فقیریست که مادرش به دندان گرفت و اورا کشاند تا مدارس وابسته به کلیسا که به لطف صدای مخملی اش برایش بورسیه فراهم کرد. بله ، استالین پیش از همه ی این ها خوش صدایی بود جذاب که مردم حاضر بودند پول بدهند تا برایشان بخواند
بعد تر به شاعری و نویسندگی روی آورد و چنان اشعار شاعرانه و پر سوز و گدازعاشقانه ای گفت که حسابی بین گرجی ها طرفدار پیدا کرد.
ناگهان سر و کله ی ولادیمیر ایلیچ یا آن طوری که معروف است لنین در زندگی او مثل خیلی های دیگر پیدا شد
بزرگترین کار گروهی دنیای مدرن داشت شکل می گرفت و انقلاب با آن همه هیبت بود که خودش را به آن هایی که چشمی برای دیدنش داشتند نشان می داد
ژوزف داستان ما شد مسئول زدن بانک های دولتی و فراهم کردن پول برای انقلاب . درست مثل رابین هود ، جیب تزار متفرعن و عیاش را می زد و خرج توده های مظلوم می کرد. البته با واسطه .
شش بار به سیبری تبعید شد و پنج بار از آنجا گریخت . تا آن بار آخر که حسابی گیر افتاد و ماند تا انقلاب از راه برسد . خودش خوب می دانست چه تبعیدگ��ه بدی است �� همین شد که تا آخر عمرش چند ده میلیون نفر را روانه آنجا ساخت.
استالین اول دشمنانش را نابود کرد ، بعد به جان دوستان سابقش افتاد و این شد سراسر زندگی 73 ساله اش
آشنایی با دوستان جدید ، سوءظن به آن ها و سپس دادن دستور قتل شان و تبعید خانواده هایشان به سیبری
آخر سر آن شاگرد کفاشی ، آن نیمه کشیش خوش صدا
شد امپراطور قدرقدرتی که از برلین تا دریای ژاپن را در دست گرفته بود و بیش از بیست میلیون نفر از مردم کشورش را به عنوان دشمن به جوخه های اعدام سپرده بود. اما دیگر نه دوستی داشت و نه کسی دوستش می داشت
هرچند اتحاد جماهیر و آن آدم ها نیستند اما این روایت ، روایت آدم هاست ، دوستی ها و دشمنی ها و بی وفایی دنیا
بخوانید که به شدت پند آموز است و لذت بخش

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I brought Montefiore's The Romanovs with me when I moved to Russia in October '17, and never got through it- not because it was bad, but because its (necessarily) episodic structure combined with my new work schedule wore me down. I don't remember what I did with the heavy hardcover book, which I shouldn't have brought on an international flight anyway, but it's probably still in Moscow somewhere, maybe in the used section of a bookstore, and my only regret after putting it aside was that I might never find out what happened after Nicholas I. Did everything turn out well enough in that vast hyperborean land everyone kept maneuvering and scheming and occasionally poisoning each other for control over?

...Well no, it didn't, although it was a strange feeling to read Montefiore's Stalin over the course of a few days off I had in early May '18, most of it in a nearly empty McDonald's above the Frunzenskaya station, while Muscovites gathered in the streets nearby for the Victory Day celebrations. In contrast to my sluggish pace on The Romanovs, I read it very quickly, probably too quickly, because without being able to glance back at it (this book disappeared mysteriously as well), I only retain a few disconnected images and anecdotes: Nadezhda Alliluyeva's suicide; Stalin moving the Joint Staff to the Kirovskaya metro station, now Chistyye Prudy, during the Nazi invasion; "going to have coffee with Beria", a frightening euphemism; Stalin saying, "Lenin founded our state and we've fucked it up"; Stalin making his men watch American westerns with him; and "...how often Stalin's victims compared their plight to a dream."

I should read this again at some point, or maybe psych myself up for Stephen Kotkin's epic trilogy.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intimate biography of Joseph Stalin focusing on his inner circle of family and advisers. Montefiore’s fly-on-the-wall approach captures the Soviet Man of Steel at the height of his destructive powers, between the death of his second wife Nadezhda in 1932 and his own demise twenty-one years later. Between that time was an awful lot of death, with tens of millions of Soviet citizens perishing in the Ukrainian famine, Stalin’s Great Terror, the Second World War, post-war attacks on Jews and various other purges and atrocities. Montefiore’s book, unfortunately, isn’t the best at exploring those Big Events, which only captures them sidelong or on the rare occasions when his protagonists directly intervene. Instead it’s a portrait of Stalin as Man, who emerges as surprisingly multidimensional: his intelligence, dry wit and affectionate charm towards his inner circle, at least in the earlier years of his rule, belie the common portrait of him as an austere, humorless bureaucrat. But a multidimensional monster is still a monster: after consolidating power and destroying his rivals, Stalin became increasingly paranoid, petty, violent and unwilling to trust his followers or even accept reality (Montefiore spends a great deal of time detailing Stalin’s baffled response to Operation Barbarossa, which nearly cost the USSR the war). Montefiore shows Stalin’s degeneration from Man of Steel to Mad King, with his discontented children (his strong-willed daughter Svetlana and debauched son Vassili) and devious courtiers (eg. the austere “professional revolutionary” Molotov, ever-amenable Malenkov, functionary Zhadnov and, of course, the odious psychopath Lavrenti Beria) scheming, manipulating and assassinating each other like Borgias as they seek their boss’s favor. It’s a chilling portrait of absolute power, where one man controlled the tiniest aspects of his society - up to, and including, his intimates.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

And I thought I had a repulsive idea of the horrors of the USSR before? Well, this book certainly made me realize how little I really knew. Stalin was capable of kindness and humor with family and friends and yet boundless, sadistic cruelty. Simon Sebag Montefiore writes a fantastic, detailed and gruesome portrait of one of the most prolific murderers of the 20th C. In about 670 breathless pages, we see the rise of the dictator, the terror of the 30’s, the negotiations with Hitler, the near-success of Operation Barbarossa, the comeback at Stalingrad and the post-war horrors in Russia. There are way too many names for my head to recall but the portraits of Beria, Molotov and Krushchev were particularly chilling. There were moments during the forced starvation of the Five Year Plan or during the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad and particularly during the nearly constant torture of friends, enemies, accomplices and the vast majority of innocent bystanders in the labyrinth of the Lubyanka. I recall walking next to this horrible prison (which now sports a children’s clothing store of all things!) and almost getting sweat running down my back. And this before reading this book and more fully appreciating the depth of violence that men sunk to in there. The other damning evidence that I found hard to digest – apart from the many anti-Semitic purges and pogroms – was the excesses of Stalin’s magnates in rape and theft particularly during and after the war. The world’s religions – and here I include Bolshevism high on the list – all thrive on an egalitarian message for the masses and yet rich bounty for those at the top. Stalin’s minions were just as bad as those in the Vatican or TV preachers in the American heartland. And yet, they stooped at nothing to destroy others by accusing them of “Western values”.

If you wish to have a better appreciation for this particularly somber, hopeless piece of human history including one of the three greatest human slaughters in history (aside from Hitler’s and Mao’s of course), this is probably an excellent place to start. It is well-written, incredibly well-researched and seeps in detail upon detail. That being said, if you are in a depressive mood, this is probably not the book for you because you will definitely hit bottom at least a few times – I did in any case. Biggest lesson learned by me: the adage Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely never rang more true than with this particular monster.

[Peadar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't like this book. It's a top-down history of 23 years and a bit in the life of Joseph Stalin, focusing in on his 50th birthday in 1929 to his death in March 1953. Montefiore just like in his book about the Romanov dynasty prefers salacious details and court gossip to actual social history.

The problem? You get a very restricted view of Stalin's rule, primarily focusing on how the high ranking members of the CPSU (Communist Party Of The Soviet Union) survived (or didn't) his mass purges and savage violence. There are a few comments here and there about the effects of Stalin's policies on ordinary Russian's most of these are actually about the Ukranian famine and you do get a sense of how devastating it was, but even then Montefiore seems more interested in the intrigues of Kruschev, Molotov and Beria along with the rest of Stalin's courter's not to mention the "Red Tsar" himself.

It's not that I want to read about the mass suffering of millions of people but it's hard to avoid suffering when talking about Stalin and I can't help feeling that the populace of Russia and it's surrounding satellites suffered more than the communist magnates surrounding Stalin.

That is not to say they didn't suffer, and I get the upsetting feeling that Montefiore revels in writing about the serial killings, torture and sexual assaults, he spends a lot of time in the book discussing them and by the end you just sort of feel sick and depressed. Beria is hands down one of the most disturbing figures of the 20th century. I'd say he's more disturbing than Stalin but that's not true as Stalin hired him in the first place. And I really could have done without an entire chapter devoted to Beria's numerous sexual assaults so cheers for that Simon.

There are also some rather surprising ahistorical comments in the book such as Montefiore commenting that Mao Zedong was an 'unlikely source' for warning Stalin of the imminent Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. This is a rather baffling statement which makes me question the author's wider historical knowledge because if you know the full international history (world war II is called a world war for a reason) then you would know that at the time Mao and the Chinese communists had formed an alliance with their rivals Chiang Kai Shek and his KMT nationalist party to fight off imperial Japan who had invaded Manchuria in 1931. Chiang Kai Shek had German civil-servants working in his government since the early 1930s, furthermore, imperial Japan was allied with Nazi Germany, so it is not too surprising that Mao discovered Hitler's intentions to invade Russia.

This again shows the limitations of individual biographical history as it cuts out essential parts of the picture. Another serious issue with the book is that Montifoire seems to assume you know details already. For instance, he documents Stalin's postwar feud with Tito, one of the more interesting parts of the biography (along with the war years) but says early on that Stalin would 'later order (Tito) assisted' this sentence to someone unfamiliar with the history implies Stalin actually had Tito murdered, - his assassination attempts failed. Tito outlived Stalin dying in 1980. Yes, the book is not about Tito, but the line is confusing, and disjointed especially as Montifoire doesn't return to discuss the rest of the Stalin-Tito conflict till much later after that line since he gets sidelined with Beria's sexual assaults among other details.

I think the take away from this is that social history matters and context matters. I would recommend reading Orlando Feige's "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924" as almost essential background reading as it covers vital information that this book skims over. Montefiore even steals a line from that book when he describes the Bolshevik party under Lenin as being 'leather-wearing and ultra-macho.' The most important reason to read APT, however, is that I feel it is what this book should have been it discusses the top historical figures but gives a wider picture of Russia throughout so you get to look at events from the perspectives of many different people. It has its own problems which I won't go into here but I feel that it at least told it's story in a more relevant and thoughtful way.

Montefiore clearly read Suetonius's "the Lives Of the Twelve Ceaser's" which reads like a salacious gossip column about Ancient Rome's first Emperor's and decided to go with that sort of tone. I believe what he says is true as it's clear he's done research but the problem is he's only doing research into Stalin and his courtiers. You might say a biography shouldn't focus on social history but I would say in response to that.....

Read Phillip Short's (2005) "Pol Pot: Anatomy Of A Nightmare" ostensibly a biography of Cambodian dictator Pol Pot but one that places him in a historical context and talks about the social and cultural elements in Cambodia, before during and after his terrible reign. That book in itself is problematic as Short ends up victim-blaming the Cambodian people for Pol Pot's crimes but he at least got the structure right by focusing on Cambodian history and emphasizing context.

This book reads like an isolated oddity.

Read it if you want disturbing details about Stalin and those around him but if you want to know about the social history of the times I would give it a miss.

[SAM · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stalin is the second leader/dictator I have read a biography about. Pol Pot was the first and although he was pretty mean and his crimes horrific, Stalin comes out of this book looking worse. While it's probably not ethical to compare mass murdering leaders it's impossible not to form a mini league in your mind. I've technically read about Castro via the Che Guevara biography and i'd class him as third in my imaginary league. Stalin's younger years are covered in the other Montefiore book Young Stalin, which i haven't read, so the Court of the Red Tsar starts from the beginning of his political career up to his death. 

This book should have come with a 'name overload' warning as there's a seriously huge cast of characters which, unless Russia is your all consuming passion, will make the book difficult to get through. I understand history is set in stone and names can't just be erased but do we really need to know about everyone? The book is very dense in detail and it feels as though the author has re-traced Stalin's every insignificant step. There's single sentences of random conversations that are inserted, sometimes with no relevance to what came before. This becomes annoying as does the tedious painstaking detail of menial everyday tasks that Stalin carried out as if the mere mention of them is special just because its Stalin. 

For me, the most interesting section related to The Terror and the hundreds of thousands of people committed to death lists. Whilst I knew a lot of people died i was ignorant of the true horror and statistics. It's a shame my school history lessons were about the american pilgrims, a subject capable of boring anyone into insanity. I'd much rather of learnt about how evil people can be as this is more relevant to post school life. The section of the German invasion during WW2 should have held my attention more than it did but the more of the book i read the more clunky and incoherent i found the authors writing style to be. The book just didn't flow. 

The post war section up until his death was a massive chore to get through and i was so thankful when i'd finished. I'm glad i read this book but at the same time i never want to see it again.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one gets a solid 5 stars as it was clearly thoroughly reasearched and well-written. It's a history lesson full of information, dates, names and events (so it's not always a smooth read) but it's also an inside look at the man and his effect on those around him. I've read many books centered around this time in history but never once specifically focused on Stalin and his reign. I feel like I have gained so much knowledge of the behind the scenes workings of this man and his politics. A great lesson in history.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Ha, Ha!"
-Joseph Stalin

Like the grand Joker in an empire of nightmares, the murderous despot Joseph Stalin merely had to scrawl this terrifying mirthless laugh onto your report, your novel manuscript or your symphony, to inform you that you'd transgressed. And, if you were lucky, you could correct your text and remain alive.

And thus, I've thought long and hard about how to write this review, to do this magisterial work of history a semblance of what it's due. The oppressive spirit of Stalin hangs over me, or perhaps the judgment of my own readers, fearful as I am of the dreaded "ha, ha."

Before I say more about, know this: this is the best book I've read in three years, an easy winner of my stingily awarded Golden Holy Grail honorific. It's an overpowering, awesome biography of a difficult and supremely depressing subject.

It's not the only such work out there right now. Stalin biographies have been coming at a fast and furious pace with the recent opening of long-inaccessible Russian archives, allowing biographers to finally make a credible stab at trying to understand an inexplicable man who, even after all is said and done, remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Stalin, in case you're new to history, ruled the Communist Soviet Union from the late 1920s to the early 1950s with the proverbial iron fist. Under his reign, millions died, most often cruelly and unnecessarily. His apologists, seeking to give him credit, point to his Herculean achievement at turning the USSR from a backward, feudal state into an industrial and technological world power in a decade. The means by which he achieved this are not justifiable, and yet, oddly, it might be argued that had this rapid change not happened, the country would have been overrun and capitulated to Nazi Germany. But that is all the stuff of armchair military historians, and there are no shortage of those out there. Most of them are pretty insufferable.

Author Simon Sebag Montefiore, who also penned a prequel to this, the almost equally as marvelous Young Stalin (see my review of that), comes at Stalin from a slightly different angle: to gauge the effect on those around him -- high associates (called "magnates"), old Bolsheviks, military commanders, and even close family -- of living and working in such an angsty, pressure-cooker environment. Needless to say, the results were typically tragic; so many lives torn asunder. This theme interweaves itself throughout the text, but at the end of the day this is mostly a straight-up biography of an inscrutable and complex man. Not the oafish simpleton so often portrayed, Stalin was a well-read, conniving, semi-intellectual who referred often to his simple roots to wield power in a nation of largely backward people. He pointed, often, with pride to his humble peasant roots, while simultaneously waging merciless terror on those very peasants.

For those living under Stalin, including those most close to him, a brand new kind of survival strategy evolved. One had to toady, but not too much. It was always a matter to reading the "tells." If Stalin's pipe was unlit, for instance, that meant he was in a foul mood, so tread lightly. If his pipe was lit, he would be more amenable. When to be a yes-man, and when not to be, had to be ascertained. But even then, Stalin was a man of supreme caprice. In one example in the book, he is asked about the punishment of an accused transgressor, causing him to pace back and forth, smoking his pipe, pondering aloud: "To forgive, or not to forgive..." Finally, he decided to forgive. Save by the pipe? Or by the feeling of power that such a man had, to bestow judgments at a momentary whim.

For those looking for the mere sensational, there's more than plenty of that here. Readers interested in horror books need look no further. Stalin employed a series of torturer henchmen to do what he euphemistically called his "black work." Beria, Abakumov, Riumin: all sick individuals coldly sadistic and effective at their work. One, named Blokhin, wore a butcher's apron while plying his trade, to keep his suit clean. "Coffee with Beria" was Stalin's way of saying that some unfortunate was under Beria's interrogation. It was just one of many in Stalin's strange, secretive litany of euphemisms.

I'd lined up many examples of the book's fascinating observations about Stalin, but one that stuck out was this one, about Stalin as a man who loved raising flowers: "...his favourite flower, the mimosa, was an organic metaphor for his own secretive sensitivity for when touched, it closed like a mouth."

I can't help but remark also on the dichotomy that Montefiore illustrates, time and again, about the atheist Stalin pursuing his aims with a certain Christian religious fervor. For instance, he always carried the death mask of Lenin with him, always lit iconically by a burning candle.

A novel of a review could be written here, and, indeed, I transcribed at least ten full pages of notes and read over them, and re-read passages in the book to check the quotes again, but instead of putting you through all that, I will forgive you all in supreme Stalinist fashion and spare you.

Needless to say, this was an amazing reading experience, and merits the highest recommendation.

KR@KY 2021

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
Publisher : ‎ W&N (30 September 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 752 pages
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 600 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.8 x 4.4 x 19.6 cm
Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ United Kingdom

সাইমন সিবাগ মন্টেফিওরের Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (২০০৩) বইটি একটি গভীর ও সুগঠিত জীবনীগ্রন্থ, যেখানে স্টালিনের ব্যক্তিগত জীবন, তাঁর শাসনযন্ত্র এবং ঘনিষ্ঠ সহযোগীদের অন্তর্দ্বন্দ্ব অত্যন্ত নিখুঁতভাবে বিশ্লেষণ করা হয়েছে। এটি মূলত ১৯২০-এর দশক থেকে স্টালিনের মৃত্যু (১৯৫৩) পর্যন্ত সময়কালকে কেন্দ্র করে রচিত। এখানে একদিকে যেমন তাঁর রাজনৈতিক উত্থান ও একনায়কতন্ত্র প্রতিষ্ঠার বর্ণনা রয়েছে, অন্যদিকে তেমনই তাঁর পারিবারিক ও ব্যক্তিগত জীবনের নানা দিক উঠে এসেছে।

বইটির মূল প্রতিপাদ্য হল কীভাবে স্টালিন কেবলমাত্র একজন কঠোর একনায়ক ছিলেন না, বরং তাঁর চারপাশে একটি আভিজাত্য বা "কোর্ট" গড়ে উঠেছিল, যেখানে তাঁর সহযোগী, প্রতিদ্বন্দ্বী ও পরিবারের সদস্যদের প্রতিনিয়ত ভয়, ষড়যন্ত্র ও আনুগত্যের পরীক্ষার মুখে পড়তে হত। মন্টেফিওর মূলত গোপন নথি, ব্যক্তিগত চিঠিপত্র এবং প্রত্যক্ষদর্শীদের সাক্ষাৎকারের ভিত্তিতে এই চিত্রটি উপস্থাপন করেছেন।

বিষয়বস্তুর সারসংক্ষেপ: বইটি ১৯২০-এর দশকের শেষ থেকে স্টালিনের মৃত্যু (১৯৫৩) পর্যন্ত সময়কালকে কেন্দ্র করে লেখা। মন্টেফিয়োরি এখানে শুধুমাত্র স্টালিনের রাজনৈতিক কর্মকাণ্ড নয়, বরং তার নিকটতম সহযোগীদের, পরিবার ও অভ্যন্তরীণ বৃত্তের জীবনের অন্তরঙ্গ কাহিনি ফুটিয়ে তুলেছেন। স্টালিনের মস্কোর ক্রেমলিনে বসবাস, তার মন্ত্রীপরিষদ, গুপ্তচর নেটওয়ার্ক, পারিবারিক জীবন, ব্যক্তিগত আক্রোশ এবং নৃশংসতার নানা দিক তুলে ধরা হয়েছে।

এটি কেবল একটি ঐতিহাসিক জীবনী নয়, বরং ক্ষমতার কেন্দ্রে অবস্থানকারী ব্যক্তিদের জটিল সম্পর্কের এক অনন্য দলিল। বইটিতে স্টালিনের কাছের লোকজন—যেমন ভ্যাচেসলাভ মোলটভ, ল্যাভরেন্তি বেরিয়া, ক্লিমেন্ট ভোরোশিলভ, সার্গেই কিরভ প্রমুখের ভূমিকা বিশদভাবে আলোচিত হয়েছে। বিশেষত, স্টালিনের স্ত্রী নাদেঝদা অ্যালিলুয়েভার আত্মহত্যার ঘটনা এবং তার মানসিক ও ব্যক্তিগত প্রভাব বইটির অন্যতম গুরুত্বপূর্ণ অংশ।

মূল থিম ও বিশ্লেষণ:

১. স্টালিনের ক্ষমতা ও ব্যক্তিত্ব: মন্টেফিয়োরি স্টালিনকে কেবলমাত্র একনায়ক হিসেবে চিত্রিত করেননি, বরং এক বহুমাত্রিক চরিত্র হিসেবে উপস্থাপন করেছেন। তার চালাক, সন্দেহপ্রবণ, নিষ্ঠুর কিন্তু একই সঙ্গে সাংস্কৃতিকভাবে সমৃদ্ধ স্বভাবের পরিচয় পাওয়া যায়। তিনি কীভাবে পুরনো বলশেভিকদের ধ্বংস করে নিজেকে একচ্ছত্র শাসক হিসেবে প্রতিষ্ঠিত করেছিলেন, তার বিশদ ব্যাখ্যা রয়েছে বইটিতে।

২. ভয় ও অবিশ্বাসের রাজনীতি: স্টালিনের শাসনকাল ছিল এক চরম আতঙ্কের যুগ। ‘গ্রেট পার্জ’ (১৯৩৬-১৯৩৮) চলাকালে স্টালিন তার ঘনিষ্ঠ বন্ধু ও রাজনৈতিক সহযোগীদের একের পর এক গ্রেপ্তার ও হত্যা করান। মন্টেফিয়োরি দেখিয়েছেন কীভাবে স্টালিন তার চারপাশের মানুষদের ওপর আধিপত্য বজায় রাখার জন্য ভয় ও অবিশ্বাসের রাজনীতি ব্যবহার করতেন।

৩. পরিবার ও ব্যক্তিগত জীবন: স্টালিনের পরিবার, বিশেষ করে তার স্ত্রী নাদেঝদার আত্মহত্যার পর তার জীবন কীভাবে বদলে গিয়েছিল, তা লেখক সংবেদনশীলভাবে বিশ্লেষণ করেছেন। স্টালিনের সন্তানদের (যাকভ, ভাসিলি, স্ভেতলানা) সঙ্গে তার সম্পর্কের টানাপোড়েনও গুরুত্বপূর্ণ একটি অংশ।

৪. মিথ্যাচার ও প্রপাগান্ডা: গ্রন্থটিতে স্টালিনের প্রচারযন্ত্রের দক্ষ ব্যবহারের উপরও জোর দেওয়া হয়েছে। কীভাবে তিনি ইতিহাসকে বিকৃত করে, নিজের ভাবমূর্তি তৈরি করেন এবং সোভিয়েত জনগণকে একটি নির্দিষ্ট আদর্শে পরিচালিত করেন, তা বিশদভাবে বর্ণিত হয়েছে।

মন্টেফিয়োরির লেখনী অত্যন্ত সুগঠিত, সাহিত্যধর্মী এবং নাটকীয়তা সমৃদ্ধ। তিনি বিভিন্ন ব্যক্তিগত চিঠি, মন্ত্রিসভার আলোচনা, স্টালিনের সহযোগীদের সাক্ষাৎকার ও সোভিয়েত আর্কাইভ থেকে সংগৃহীত তথ্যের উপর ভিত্তি করে বইটি রচনা করেছেন। ইতিহাসের কঠোর বিশ্লেষণের পাশাপাশি লেখকের বর্ণনাশৈলীর কারণে এটি উপন্যাসের মতোই আকর্ষণীয় হয়ে উঠেছে।

সমালোচনা ও সীমাবদ্ধতা: যদিও বইটি গভীর গবেষণা ও তথ্যনিষ্ঠতার পরিচয় দেয়, তবুও কিছু সমালোচনাও বিদ্যমান।

১. মন্টেফিওরের বর্ণনার নাটকীয়তা: লেখকের লেখনী অত্যন্ত চমকপ্রদ ও রোমাঞ্চকর, যা কখনো কখনো অতিরঞ্জিত মনে হতে পারে। কিছু সমালোচক মনে করেন, তিনি স্টালিনের ব্যক্তিগত জীবনকে একটু বেশিই রঙিন করে তুলেছেন।

২. বেরিয়া ও অন্যান্য চরিত্রের উপস্থাপনা: ল্যাভ্রেন্তি বেরিয়া সম্পর্কে বইটিতে বেশ কিছু চাঞ্চল্যকর দাবি করা হয়েছে, যেগুলো অনেক গবেষক অতিরঞ্জিত বলে মনে করেন। বিশেষ করে তাঁর যৌন সহিংসতার প্রসঙ্গ নিয়ে বিতর্ক রয়েছে।

৩. স্টালিনের আদর্শিক দিকের তুলনামূলক অভাব: বইটি মূলত স্টালিনের ব্যক্তিগত রাজনীতির দিকেই বেশি মনোযোগ দিয়েছে, তবে তাঁর আদর্শিক অবস্থান, অর্থনৈতিক নীতি ও দ্বিতীয় বিশ্বযুদ্ধের ভূমিকাকে তুলনামূলকভাবে কম গুরুত্ব দেওয়া হয়েছে।

পরিশেষে এটুকুই বলার যে 'Simon Sebag Montefiore-র Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar' নিঃসন্দেহে আধুনিক ইতিহাসের অন্যতম সেরা জীবনীগ্রন্থগুলোর একটি। এটি শুধুমাত্র স্টালিনকে বোঝার জন্য নয়, বরং একনায়কতন্ত্র কিভাবে কাজ করে এবং কীভাবে ব্যক্তি ও রাষ্ট্রের মধ্যে সম্পর্ক গড়ে ওঠে, তা বুঝতেও সাহায্য করে।

যদি কেউ সোভিয়েত যুগের জটিল রাজনীতি, ষড়যন্ত্র এবং একজন স্বৈরশাসকের অন্তর্জগত জানতে চান, তবে এই বইটি অবশ্যপাঠ্য। তবে, পাঠকের উচিত বইটি পড়ার সময় এর নাটকীয়তা ও সম্ভাব্য অতিরঞ্জন সম্পর্কে সচেতন থাকা।

পড়ুন ও পড়ান ইতিহাসের অনুরাগীদের।

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Gossip is the true history".---Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Simon Montefiore has taken this maxim to heart in examining the political life of the man who was arguably the greatest mover of the twentieth century. For him personal details and anecdotes mean more than political history, or rather the two are the same. Take, for example, Stalin's complicated relations with the Jews. His anti-semitism is well documented, yet Stalin also appointed Jews to important posts. His choice of Lazar Kaganovich to oversee the collectivization of the Ukraine was probably meant to pit Jews against Ukrainians during the subsequent famine, just as his voice for anti-German-propaganda during World War II, Illya Ehrenberg, made the rabid broadcasts he pronounced to the Red Army more comprehensible and forgivable. Must read for those who wish to understand how Stalin's legacy lives on today, and not just in Russia.

[Calzean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that takes the reader into the world of Stalin and his cronies. The historical events of the coming to power, the terror in 1937, preparation for war, WWII and its aftermath are backdrops to the study of Stalin and how his behaviour. Midnight cinema showings, followed by 6 hours of drinking, eating, dancing and egotism - every night. Making everyone fear for their lives. The joy Stalin took in the murder of millions. And yet he was insecure, incredibly intelligent but incredibly lonely.
The parts where Stalin met with Churchill and FDR, and later with Mao are frightening as to how these guys see everything is about them.
A brilliant book - worth the effort of reading.

[John Farebrother · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another monolithic yet infinitely readable history of a controversial world figure. The painstaking research carried out by the author allows him to go beyond the notorious facts of Stalin's life, and penetrate the inner world of the man himself, allowing a glimpse into what motivated him and drove him on. This is not just a paper study, a review of all the existing documents (although it is that as well), the author also travelled to Georgia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, and met with key individuals who had known Stalin personally. Anyone interested in the period of world upheaval that marked (and was marked by) Stalin's rule must read this.

[Boudewijn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chilling view in the life of Stalin and his close associates. Nobody was safe in the presence of Stalin. Simon Sebag Montefiore gives a detailed account of the Court of the Red Tsar.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know. I may need something lighter -- and soon!

Update: I may write some more on this later. At times fascinating, heartbreaking, but also at times a boring read. Montefiore has all kinds of juicy gossip, due to the opening up of old Soviet archives. He takes the new material and attaches it to the history of the period. It works well -- up until WW 2, and then he has to cover a lot of big events quickly -- and this in a 650 page book! In addition, when Montefiore gets to WW 2, I sensed a creeping admiration for Stalin starting to show its head. This is due largely Stalin's sensing the historical moment as the Germans approached the gates of Moscow, and thus holding his ground. Whatever. Chapter 20 (Blood Bath by Numbers) was the keeper, which goes on to describe the "execution" of order 00447. Basically this was a death quota order that resulted in the murder of thousands. Such was the Terror. Montefiore suggests that there was some sort of linkage between it and the suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadja. I'm not sure I'm buying into that answering the Why? of the Terror. But it may answer Stalin's bizarre tendency to imprison -- and often kill, the wives of high ranking Soviet officials (and friends). Stalin was a dick.

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

List of Illustrations
Stalin Family Tree
Maps
Introduction and Acknowledgements
List of Characters

--Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Postscript
Select Bibliography
Index

(The full and extremely extensive references for this book are available in the hardback edition and also on the author's website at: http://www.simonsebagmontefiore.com. Many of the sources for this work are totally new. However, to make the paperback a manageable and readable size, the author and publisher have decided not to include them in the paperback. We hope the readers will agree that, for most, the balance of convenience is best served by this policy.)