Product Description

Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes–as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag–has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century. But though the facts of Stalin’s reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundation–human, psychological and physical–that supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him.

In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of seventy-three. Through the lens of personality–Stalin’s as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them–the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalin’s favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemmingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenin’s dictum, “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless”). We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalin’s inner court, and we see how the dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the awful efficiency of his killing machine.

With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalin’s court. And he traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s gives way to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II (there has never been as acute an account of Stalin’s meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the rest of his country.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin’s dictatorship, and, as well, a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive and unforgiving.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #351683 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-13
• Released on: 2004-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 816 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Montefiore (The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin) is more interested in life at the top than at the bottom, so he includes hundreds of pages on Stalin's purges of top Communists, while devoting much less space to the forced collectivization of Soviet peasants that led to millions of deaths. In lively prose, he intersperses his mammoth account of Stalin's often-deadly political decisions with the personal lives of the Soviet dictator and those around him. As a result, the reader learns about sexual peccadilloes of the top Communists: Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, for one, "craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players." Stalin's own escapades after the death of his wife are also noted. There's also much detail about the food at parties and other meetings of Stalin's henchmen. The effect is paradoxical: Stalin and his cronies are humanized at the same time as their cruel misdeeds are recounted. Montefiore offers little help in answering some of the unsettled questions surrounding Stalin: how involved was he in the 1934 murder of rising official Sergei Kirov, for example. He also seems to leave open the question of Stalin's paranoia: he argues that the Georgian-born ruler was a charming man who used his people skills to get whatever he wanted. Montefiore mainly skirts the paranoia issue, noting that only after WWII, when Stalin launched his anti-Semitic campaigns, did he "become a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite." There are many Stalin biographies out there, but this fascinating work distinguishes itself by its extensive use of fresh archival material and its focus on Stalin's ever-changing coterie. Maps and 24 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Any biography of a tyrant runs the risk of humanizing its subject to the point of appearing to mitigate his crimes. But Montefiore's intimate portrait actually throws the coldhearted murderousness with which Stalin pursued and defended power into sharper relief. The book—much of it based on fresh archival material—moves smoothly between detailed sketches of everyday life at the Kremlin and accounts of the paranoid and sanguinary scheming that determined Soviet politics. This juxtaposition captures the vertiginous quality of life in Stalin's court, where no allegiance was permanent. Just as strikingly, Montefiore shows how Stalin, a "master of friendships," used charm to win the support of members of the Party's inner circle (many of whom ended up regretting it). This haunting book gets us as close as we are likely to come to the man who believed that "the solution to every human problem was death."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Because of its extraordinary detail, this portrait of Joseph Stalin is as realistic as is currently historically possible. Relying on Stalin's personal correspondence with his family and his "magnates," as Montefiore terms the dictator's lieutenants, the author liberally quotes letters, memoirs, and interviews he conducted with survivors in his book chronicling the years 1929-53. Through vignettes of a typical vacation, night at the Kremlin office, or drunken party at the dacha, the author evokes the atmosphere of Stalin's entourage. Stalin could be charming, Montefiore reports. Magnates and their wives bantered with the leader; lesser lieges wisely aped his pronouncements. But beneath the bonhomie was a substrate of mortal danger. Montefiore emphasizes Stalin's feral suspiciousness throughout, his feigned modesty masking his megalomania, his patience in exacting sadistic revenge. Those traits are exhibited in the fatal fallout from this work's opening scene, the 1932 suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadya, and then metastasize in descriptions of Stalin's conspiratorial milestones, from the likely arranged 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov to the Doctor's Plot of 1953. By illustrating how Stalin acted in private, Montefiore has produced a landmark work that rounds out political biographies of the tyrant. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Keep your Friends close but keep your Enemies closer!
I first learned of this book by watching Book notes with Brian Lamb on C-Span. Mr. Montefiore is a British journalist with an historian's bent.
This extraordinary study of 785 pages details the personal life of Joseph Stalin. I must admit I was indeed taken back as to the rather cavalier attitude of Stalin in forcing his hand on all things of his immediate friends and associates in government. He indeed tried to control every aspect of their lives. As Michiko Kakutani described in her review in the New York Times, his cure-all was murder. Oh yes, Joseph Stalin ranks higher than Adolph Hitler in his elimination of the human race.
Joseph Stalin was the classic result of the Bolshevik culture. He trusted no one. Everyone was his enemy. Hitler was just as much of an adversary to Stalin as Beria who was a Bolshevik associate.
As stated by Montefiore, Joseph Stalin could act compassionate and display his ultimate Uncle Joe impersonation. However, in the end he was indeed a brutal and unforgiving person. He was a classic paranoid.
My old friend from the New York Times Michiko Kakutani rather likes this book. She indeed saw it as a limited study of Stalin with his immediate friends and subordinates during his time as leader of the Soviet Union. However back in her mind this study according to her should have included Stalin's entire oeuvre of philosophy of Communism.
Again she is indeed wrong, this is a study of the private Joseph Stalin. Doing it as Ms. Kakutani wants it done would take 3 volumes of 785 pages each.
Good work, long read but I liked it. 5 Stars, no problem!!!

Jewish inolveement ....
The main objective of Montefiore's books about Stalin is to whitewash Jewish involvement in the Bolshevick Revolution. They paint a picture which eliminates Jewish involvement in what was absolutely a Jewish controlled affair - both from abroad through Kuhn and Loeb et. al. and from within.

Not for novices
Yowzahs! If you want a DETAILED biography of Stalin's political life then pick this up. I fully recommend it to grad and doctoral students or anyone else writing a book.
If you are a little curious and your last Russian history class was in high school, then you might want to look elsewhere.
I was overwhelmed. When I got out of bed, wanting to draw my own character profiles and story arcs, I decided that this would NOT be a good bed time read.
Thorough, scholarly and well-written this book made me feel stupid.