Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

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

Meet the great man at home! Montefiore's focus, as the title suggests, is on Stalin's party life. Take that in its full double meaning. Even the word terror, which acquired special meaning under the rule of this monster, seems to be reserved to the ill treatment that the man gave his pals. Never mind that some million people died of starvation in the early 30s and kept dying in large numbers from slave labor in the Gulags, the man himself had much more time for his dachas and his friends. O, and it seems he was a really knowledgeable reader of literature.

The man's second wife, apparently a manic depressive, committed suicide in 1932 (at least that is the ruling theory). There are only assumptions about the reasons, but they fall into the category of jealousy and general wifely unreasonableness. It seems the poor man suffered a lot from that, why had she done that to him, etc, and the theory is that he became a monster only after that trauma. O the poor fellow, he was such a charmer before this event.

Let me say, as you might have guessed, that Montefiore's attitude in this piece of fat court reporting, gets on my nerves mightily.

What is the job of a biographer? He/she collects information, which is not so hard in Stalin's case, and is becoming easier with the opening of more archives. Hence in the next step, the abundance must be organized, important facts must be selected, lesser ones must be sidelined. The material must be put in shape. And finally, it is not enough to line up quotes from the subject person and his entourage plus the rest of the world, the arrangement of the material normally requires some actual writing by the biographer.
Take as shining examples for what I mean as a good bio the two cases of Joachim Fest's Hitler and Jun Chang's Mao. Now Montefiore is not remotely in that class.

He does a good job at assembling plenty of information, then decides to focus on the court relations, and abstains largely from the fight with attempts at an own writing style, not to mention the possibility of a more than passing evaluation of the facts. Instead you get a very long tabloid article.

Praise to author, researcher, historian, intellectual, poet Simon Sebag Montefiore for his work on what is a testimonial to the human spirit's quest for truth. The ending impact of the ending of the post script can only fully be appreciated for its breath taking depth by experiencing rack word of this triumph. Thank Mr.Sebag Montefiore.

amazingly good, i would say stupidly good, it just gives you that awkward feeling in your gut that this monster was an actual human being. hard thing to over come when you're reading and you don't want him to die.

Superb, fascinating--and a surprise--suspenseful; and alarming when some of his and his buds' characteristics are seen in govt. personalities today. Fortunately murders and camps are not allowed at the moment, but if they were......have no doubt....

Another reviewer's word - "tedious." I agree. Although the writer seems to have done exhaustive research, the presentation is lifeless. The words "pedantic" and "pedestrian" come to mind. He seems not to have entered the Georgian-Russian-Bolshevik spirit. Disappointing. Read Robert Service, and read Solzhenitsyn. Not close in quality to Ian Kershaw's work on Hitler.

A lot about family and friends. Troubles with his wife. Casually mentioning that he has ordered the killing of 10,000 with no discussion or details or reasons or nothing. I wanted some history and placement of time and circumstances. I am not interested in how he got along with his wife; obviously not too bright to be married to a man the equivalent to Hitler.

While I was surprised by the number of extremely clunky sentences in this book, credit must be given where it is due: this is an outstanding work of original history by someone who worked from the primary sources of living witnesses (or their children) and archival papers. The author is a man of deep familiarity with the history, the source materials, the scuttlebutt and the culture. And what he reveals here is a more intimate and revealing picture of history's most terrifying monster than we have heretofore known. Rather than focusing on the processes and implications of macropolitical decisions, as more conventional histories are wont to do, Montefiore intimately examines the nerve center of the Soviet Empire which was, surprisingly, Stalin's dinner table and his cadre of criminal associates. One always got the impression that, as brutal as the Soviets were, their state functioned somewhat like a normal government with a professional bureaucracy carrying out decisions arrived at by some sort of formal process in the Kremlin. Instead, Montefiore demonstrates in sickening detail that the business of the Soviet government was mass murder for its own sake, with government "policy" in that regard issued insanely by Stalin at his bacchanals. All the fascinating details- such as Stalin's deep reading and lovely singing voice- fade into the background when contrasted with all that blood.

Although Montefiore has done much research, much of it salacious, his book reads as a diatribe. If anyone wants to read about Stalin without nasty adjectives, such a magnate, tsar, plotter, proconsul, etc., in sentence after sentence, I would suggest another book. Montefiore has an axe to grind. I assume his research must have led to a madness concerning Stalin. I hope he gets over it.

Sicking how brutal and murderous these commies were and still are. where are all the movies at about Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao? Oh thats right, its only politically correct to depict white males with blue eyes as evil.

Towards the end of his life, after the war, Stalin would engage in all night drinking parties with his cronies from the Politburo--Mikoyan, Molotov, Khrushchev, Beria, et. al.--and this is what ultimately killed Stalin. The parties were an attempt by Stalin to humiliate his cronies as well as threaten them with extermination. It explains why Beria was to meet his end (arrested in June 1953, shot in December, 1953) so soon after Stalin's March 1953 death. No one wanted to wait for Beria to act on Stalin's drunken incite to exterminate them. On a related note, during the innumerable formal State toasts Stalin so loved, while others drank vodka, Stalin drank water; again a tactic to have his guests humiliate themselves with drink.

The simple truth of the matter, the modern Soviet State was built on thirty years of terror that resulted in the death of maybe 30 million people and the incarceration of an equal number in Gulags across Russia. Something was going to be built no matter how many lives were going to be lost. And remarkably, people admired and loved the madman for his devotion to forcing the Russians into the twentieth century industrial era.

But the terror was not just against the Kulaks, or 'enemies of the State'--the terror was addressed to anyone who threatened Stalin's place in the Soviet Constellation. So when Kirov received three negative votes to Stalin's 292, Kirov was dispatched and soon the entire Central Committee was to be exterminated. Montefiore's book becomes one long recitation of murder most foul, one after the other. And Beria for a long time was central instigator and implementer of these murderous purges.

When Hitler invaded Russia in June of 1941, Stalin had purged his Military High Command. Truth to tell, there was no armaments sufficient to defend Moscow. Stalin kept track of the armaments in a small notebook. Only upon assurances from Japan that they would not attack Russia, could the Eastern Military Might be moved to the defense of Moscow and Stalingrad. Hitler lost Russia as much from the cold as from the foolishness of opening a 2nd Front which would inevitably not be found sufficient to defeat the Russian Military. Leningrad was lost due to Russian incompetence as well as Hitler's military might.

While the Soviet State moved into the Modern Industrial State, it moved with incompetence at its helm along with Stalin. Canals that were inadequately designed and flawed, railroad tracks that went no-where, slave labor that saw the death of one-third of the work force from overwork, starvation, cold. (is it any wonder that the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe saw the desecration for a perpetuity of land the size of Rhode Island?)

But it wasn't just Stalin who was a psychopathic killer; his entire entourage was implicated in mass murder to the tune of hundreds of thousands left dead. By the end of Stalin's life, people were fearful of calling the Doctor for fear of angering the dying man. Stalin sowed a reign of paranoia for his cronies, and his cronies in the end let him die for that very fear. But in fairness, Montefiore asserts the final stroke was so severe that not a whole lot could have been done to save Stalin's life at that point.

Beria it was who vacillated from sycophancy when he thought Stalin was going to live to contempt when he thought Stalin was about to die. Montefiore seems to think that 'trumped up charges' were brought against Beria; but to my way of thinking, the charges were based on reality and the surviving Politburo clearly fearful for their own life should Beria remain in power; first was Malenkov as Prime Minister and Beria was second as First Deputy Premier in the new Politburo after Stalin died, Khrushchev and others saw fit to get rid of him as quickly as possible so he couldn't implement Stalin's drunken lunatic ideation of murder.

This is a book about Stalin’s immediate political and social circle, his court if he were the Tsar, which in effect he was. The book clearly shows the depravity that Stalin’s paranoia and absolute power wrought. I think that it should be required reading as at illustrates what happens when power is absolute and unchecked by the rule of law and those willing to enforce it. The book is well written, highly documented and presents information that has heretofore not been available to a general audience. I recommend the book to anyone interested in history, and to a wider audience as it presents a stark reminder of why we need to defend our liberty and democratic form of government.

What is in the book –
The book begins with a prologue that describes the 1932 suicide of Stalin’s second wife Nadya, which serves to set the stage for the depravity to follow. The book then backtracks with a brief discussion of Stalin’s life before 1932 and then proceeds to discuss Stalin’s court chronologically from 1932 until his death in 1953. Rather than year-by-year, the chapters are divided into periods, which focus on aspects of general periods such as the great purge of the late 1930’s, WWII and the purges that occurred at the end of Stalin’s life. The book shows how Stalin, who did not have absolute power in 1932, used terror to achieve it, destroying anyone or any organization that might possibly have stopped him. His approach was to order the arrest of someone, predetermine the crime that he believed they were guilty of, and then to direct his torturers to extract a confession for said crime, which also incriminated others, who would also be tortured to yield up still more names. He joked that his torturers could get anyone to confess to anything and then seemed to be satisfied that the confessions represented actual fact rather than just statements to make the torture stop and to prevent their families being harmed.

Most of those he selected for this treatment would confess because they were promised that their lives would be spared if they did, which was a lie since their confessions were used as proof of their guilt and the reason why they were to be executed. They were also promised that their families would be spared if they confessed, which was also a lie as they were generally at least sent to prison. Finally, torture was used to get the names of more victims, or sometimes just for the pleasure of the sadists who extracted the confessions. Whole classes of people were effected – upper level party members, army officers, and minority populations that were exiled to Siberia during WWII. Nor were the torturers and those who directed them exempt as almost all were eventually subjected to the same system of torture, confession and execution. Likewise most of those in Stalin’s “court” were subjected to the same treatment. However, some like Molotov and Khrushchev survived because Stalin died before he could carry out his final party purge, which was to include them as well as the Jews of the USSR who had survived the Holocaust.
Stalin’s court lived in permanent fear that they would eventually be arrested, tortured, executed and their families sent to a labor camp. They were forced to endure Stalin’s taunting, his requiring that they drink themselves into a stupor every night, and play childish pranks on each other to amuse him. Few had the guts to assert themselves and to point out Stalin’s mistakes or to object to his cruelty to themselves and to their families.

Stalin’s paranoia, and the terror that it unleashed, almost caused the USSR to lose WWII, as it resulted in the murder of most of the upper officers on the army, making it weak and leaderless in the face of the German invasion. Indeed, Stalin was much to blame for almost losing the war as he refused to believe that the Germans would attack in 1941 and directed the army to take no action to counter the German buildup, and even ordered them decline to act in the face of the initial attacks themselves, as he believed that they were merely provocations meant to draw the USSR into a war – even though they were being attacked in force on all fronts. He was convinced that he understood Germany and that they would not attack until 1942 or hopefully 1943 when the USSR would be in a better position to prevail against them. Stalin was a broken man when his feeling of his own omnipotence was shattered by the German invasion, causing him to absent himself from leading the country immediately after the attack. Indeed, he expected to be arrested and shot because of his failures and only resumed control when his court came to beg him to lead them instead of arresting him.

His reign of terror actually contributed to his own death as his guards were too frightened to see what the problem was when he failed to get up at his usual time and when a light finally was turned on in his apartment they failed to question why he made no contact with them. When they finally went to see if there was a problem they were too frightened to immediately call a doctor as they believed that he may just be sleeping (in spite of the fact that he was on the floor in a pool of his own urine), and when doctors were eventually called they were not terribly competent because of their fear that they would make a mistake, and because Stalin had just imprisoned the best doctors as he believed that they were part of a Jewish plot to kill the government leadership.

One of the strangest aspects of the story of Stalin and his court was the degreed to which he was revered by those whose parents and spouses were murdered by him. After Stalin’s death, even knowing that he had personally signed off on the execution of their loved ones, often to be proceeded by torture, many still revered him believing that his actions were necessary, if sometimes excessive. Such was his absolute power - a power that controlled both body and mind.

Although the author had done extensive and ground breakinf research, the problem is that he cannot write. His prose reads like a bad first draft. Didn't the publisher have a competent editor to work on this book?

You may be well educated in Russian history and the Stalinist era, but whatever facts you've learned will be humanized to the point you'll feel you were almost there and an actual witness while reading this compelling book. Yes, one knows there was pervasive terror under Stalin. However, as a result of Montefiore's intensive research, interviews, and personalized presentation you almost feel a part of it in turning these pages. That's rarely accomplished in historical and biographical literature. The description of these terror-filled, brutal years is prolific. A majority of those murdered or exiled to the gulag were proclaimed guilty based on whims, jealousy, insecurity, fabrications, or association beyond anything else. Imagine, therefore, the horror, as the author so aptly conveys it, of living in a period when so many innocents confessed to crimes they didn't commit and in doing so implicated others based strictly on where they worked, who they associated with, and who their close relatives and friends were. The reader can almost sense the terror of family members or acquaintances potentially being implicated, executed, or imprisoned because someone associated with them was brought in for questioning for no apparent reason and quite possibly tortured and made to talk, a daily occurrence in all circles during those horrific times. My words cannot adequately convey the sense of what occurred, but Simon Sebag Montefiore's writing indelibly does.

This is an incredibly rich biography of Stalin, his family, and his ruling elites. The reader learns his personal likes and dislikes. We see this consummate killer making immoral decisions to starve millions of Russians and Ukrainians, we see him bewildered by Hitler's decision to attack Russia, we see the Battle of Stalingrad through his eyes. I was surprised by his lifelong devotion to literature, poetry, and history. Although a Georgian he worshiped great Russians. He was at once a caring father and a ruthless ruler. He carried out a war against lifelong comrades and his own people -- killing and imprisoning tens of millions. But it is his human aspect that Montefiore brings to life. He has amassed a treasure troth of valuable research. The reader is taken into the Kremlin, the dachas populated by Stalin and his friends, and the lives of the women who completed this circle of doom. These heartless rulers come to life as the murderers they are and as the private family men so many of them were. These are multi-dimensional people who committed horrendous crimes against humanity and themselves. We learn big and little things, like that Putin's grandfather cooked for Rasputin, Lenin, and Stalin. Who knew? This a monumental biography and history that I thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from reading.

The book is essentially a biography/history of Josef Stalin from the time of Lenin's death to Stalin's death, with a few notes on what followed. At just under 700 pages, it is not exactly brief, nevertheless it is tightly written, and no words are wasted, and nothing pointless is written. It has what for me was an incredible amount of detail, and it gave me a picture of events that changed my preconceived views considerably. I knew before I started that Stalin was a mass murderer, and I assumed that his senior officials were as guilty, and this is correct. What I had not realized was the reason, at least initially. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation in the 1930s as Stalin took their food and sold it to the west to get money. The reason was that Stalin believed that Germany would eventually attack Russia, and he had to industrialize to make the necessary war materials. As it happened, he was right, although there were definitely better methods to get to where he wanted. Stalin was extremely intelligent, even if he was a sociopath of the worst order. He killed 20 million, and deported 28 million, many to the gulags, for the crimes that they might eventually get around to committing. His policy was, better kill ten innocent than let one person go who might later be a problem.

The book shows how he put together the Soviet war effort, having already put to death his most capable generals. Reason: these generals believed in mechanized warfare, and rejected such things as cavalry charges. Accordingly, when Germany invaded, Russia almost collapsed. The way Stalin dealt with Roosevelt is fascinating; Stalin knew who beat Germany, and he was going to get his reward, namely half of Europe. Finally, after the war, Stalin returned to the terror. Why? This is less than clear in the book. It was probably because that was all that Stalin was now good at. Finally, we have his death, which again was somewhat different from what I thought. It was a long-drawn out and rather a painful exit, in which nobody helped in time because everybody was too scared to do anything. If there were any justice, his death was part of it. Part of the eye-opening revolved around some of the others. Khruschev was simply a murdering beast, a sort of dilute less competent Stalin. On the other hand, Beria eventually showed signs of enlightenment, after decades of mass cruelty. He saw what the Soviet Union had to do, a little like an early Gorbachev, and he was murdered for it, thanks to Zhukov and the army.

The book is well-written, it has an incredible amount of detail, it has an unbelievable index so it acts as a reference book, and if you are interested in the life of Stalin, or, for that matter, of the most pointless killer in recent times, this is the book for you.

First, let's acquiesce an important point to author Simon Montefiore: he titled his book "The Court of the Red Tsar" because that is precisely what the book involves, Joseph Stalin, his murderous deeds and mysterious nature among his den of thieves, all with horrible amounts of blood on their hands as well, and how they fell in and out of favor (which usually meant torture by a former friend) and a kangaroo court before the inevitable execution. That tale by itself is intriguing. But what is lacking in this book is much detail of the infamous Terror of 1937 outside of a few numbers and the orders for mass murders. Perhaps there are other books who go into much more detail about the victim's sides of living under Stalin, who ignored mass starvation while living in numerous homes, or dachas, engaged in all night drinking and eating, and among his cohorts, a seemingly insatiable appetite for sexual deviancy and sadism.
We get the feel of what it would be like to be a high ranking member of the Politburo, and the twisted thinking of the U.S.S.R. that comes across to myself as haphazardly constructed, poorly coordinated and ultimately, a failure of society that may never have an equal.
More details of the Big Three conferences would have been nice, as would more details of the work camps and, as I mentioned before the atrocities of maybe 25 million innocent Russians, and another 20 million sent to prison camps for life.
This is like discussing Nazi Germany without mention of the concentration camps and the evil that defined that era. Still, it's a good read, and worth the time for those interested in the more insular world of Stalin himself.

I read this book as Montefiore is a 'Stalin scholar' and because it has been written after the Soviet archives of the Stalin era was thrown open to researchers. The book is exhaustively researched and is pretty lengthy. A lot of the book deals with the 'personal' lives of the Soviet elite during the 1930s and the 1940s. The writing style is a bit laborious and so a substantial part of the book, dealing with Stalinist elite's private lives, is hard to keep reading seriously. However, the book presents the brutalities of Stalinism and how everyone from Stalin to Beria participated in the 'extermination of class enemies enthusiastically with socialist fervour.

Montefiore tries to present a holistic picture of Stalin - as a concerned father of his daughter Svetlana, as an intelligent, well-informed, hardworking and patriotic Russian leader, as one who saw 'enemies' everywhere and didn't hesitate to kill large numbers of comrades in order to emerge as the sole leader, as one who was drunk with success after the victory in the war, as one who was always suspicious and paranoid by nature, as one who was lonely towards the end of his life. The author says that he had an innate anti-semitic prejudice even though two of his closest confidantes in the Party were Molotov and Kaganovich, both Jews. Towards the end of his life, he was hostile to most of his long-time comrades and even imprisoned Polina Molotov for four years. Still, when he died, most of his oppressed colleagues wept openly and mourned his loss deeply. This is the most intriguing aspect of the 'Soviet psychology'. I wish the author had thrown some light on this aspect of the 'Stalinist aura'.

There was one piece of research in the book that was new and most interesting for me. The author writes that Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's brutal spy-chief, wasn't a socialist at heart. He believed in private property and that he wanted to 'free' eastern europe, close the gulags and allow the ethnic minorities in the USSR to return to their traditional homes and build a outward-looking capitalist Russia. He hoped to do all this after capturing power once Stalin died. One would never have thought that the brutal murderer that Beria was had such a 'liberal' outlook! The author writes that Khrushchev fully participated in the big pogroms in Ukraine of his own volition and that his later memoirs were quite selective in its honesty. The author tries to hint that the suicide of Nadya, Stalin's wife, might have made Stalin brutally suspicious and paranoid subsequently, resulting in the Great Terror of the 1930s. I wish the author had thrown some light on the murder of Trotsky and Stalin's purported role in organizing it.

Some of the lighter parts of the book relate to how obsessed the Soviet Party elite was with each other's health and how regularly they wrote long letters to each other. Amongst the elite, only Molotov emerges as a person who had a deep and loving relationship with his wife. Most of the KGB/NKVD bosses emerge as womanisers, obsessed with pornography! The book could have been condensed to half its length and could have dealt less with the personal peculiarities of most of the Stalinist clique.

I would recommend the book to anyone interested in Stalin and the Stalinist era in the development of Communism in the USSR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book more than any other demonstrates the paranoia and distrust at the heart of Stalin's Russia. It begins with Stalin's wife's suicide and then give the back story of his early life.

It is in the period of the 1930's though that this book takes off. Stalin is shown for what he was, a true megalomaniac only concerned with retaining his own power. His purges and starvation of the Ukraine are brought out as the barbaric acts they were. It also shows that Stalin was really lost at the beginning of the German invasion in 1941. For weeks instead of offering leadership, which he alone could give, he spent ill in Moscow.

However, the book also shows that Stalin learned as the war went on. He found Zhukov and let him be the military leader. Along with Rokossovsky, Konev, and Vasilevsky, he delegated, but also grew as a military leader. He was also vain. While he understood the valuable services rendered by his Generals, he also envied them their success. It was Stalin who held up the Red Army in an effort to blunt Zhukov's triumphant entry into Berlin.

At the end, Stalin is shown to be nearly as anti-Semitic as Hitler. He alone is responsible for the deaths of millions of people. Yet, he is also shown as a brilliant, if psychotic, political mind. The mendacity and utter lies that are incumbent to the Soviet state are shown in spades in this book. Stalin's world is one where the truth cannot be spoken. While horrifying, this story and the story of Stalin's Russia are ones that need to be told and remembered, so we as civilized societies do not repeat them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This book more than any other demonstrates the paranoia and distrust at the heart of Stalin's Russia. It begins with Stalin's wife's suicide and then give the back story of his early life.

It is in the period of the 1930's though that this book takes off. Stalin is shown for what he was, a true megalomaniac only concerned with retaining his own power. His purges and starvation of the Ukraine are brought out as the barbaric acts they were. It also shows that Stalin was really lost at the beginning of the German invasion in 1941. For weeks instead of offering leadership, which he alone could give, he spent ill in Moscow.

However, the book also shows that Stalin learned as the war went on. He found Zhukov and let him be the military leader. Along with Rokossovsky, Konev, and Vasilevsky, he delegated, but also grew as a military leader. He was also vain. While he understood the valuable services rendered by his Generals, he also envied them their success. It was Stalin who held up the Red Army in an effort to blunt Zhukov's triumphant entry into Berlin.

At the end, Stalin is shown to be nearly as anti-Semitic as Hitler. He alone is responsible for the deaths of millions of people. Yet, he is also shown as a brilliant, if psychotic, political mind. The mendacity and utter lies that are incumbent to the Soviet state are shown in spades in this book. Stalin's world is one where the truth cannot be spoken. While horrifying, this story and the story of Stalin's Russia are ones that need to be told and remembered, so we as civilized societies do not repeat them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For whatever reason, I seem to have a morbid fascination with the Soviet Union. For anyone with a similar affliction, you could hardly do better than Montefiore's (author of Young Stalin (Vintage) and Sashenka: A Novel) near-800 page tome on Joseph Stalin and his 30-plus year dictatorial reign in that so-called people's republic. The Soviet archives were extensive, and after the collapse of the country, the Russian government has made many such records available to the rest of the world. These records, previous work, and interviews with survivors of Stalin's time serve as Montefiore's sources for this comprehensive work.

The title of the book sums it up well. Stalin, a "comrade" of the people ruled much more like a tsar, decimating his people in the name of the continuance of his government (as it embodied the socialist path to communism), while he and his "court" (the Politburo and other high-ranking officials) lived ever more luxurious lives. The intrigue of the royal courts of Europe held nothing on Stalin and his cohorts - denunciations, political backstabbing, suspicions (grounded or groundless) - all led almost inevitably to death, of one, a few, or sometimes many, as purge orders went out demanding a specific number of killings among a certain group, regardless of identity.

With tragic irony, the soulless disregard for human life that characterized Stalin's government before World War II probably helped the Soviet Union survive Nazi Germany's invasion, as Stalin knew no limits in sacrificing his countrymen to save the Motherland. It's a testimony to the despicability of Naziism that the Soviet people didn't turn on their government when it was weakest in 1941. The story of World War II interspersed between the Soviet political terrors of the pre- and post-War eras display vividly just what "strange bedfellows" were thrown together by Hitler's aggression.

Politics aside, although they essentially never were completely, Montefiore paints vivid portraits of Stalin and his senior staff. Stalin fancied himself an intellectual and was widely read. He took direct leadership of much of Soviet culture, in particular the film industry, an activity that clouded his view about what was going on in his country. He took agricultural propaganda films as fact, even though reports from the provinces were that the people were starving. Stalin even went so far as to run a contest to compose a new national anthem, right in the middle of World War II. The notorious Lavrenti Beria, architect and executor of many of Stalin's purges, also gets particular attention. Be glad you never met this guy, though he's shown to be quite doting on his immediate family. Sexual perversion is a popular theme, though Stalin himself was a bit of a prude, his many female companions notwithstanding. Perhaps because he spent much of his time away from Moscow supervising the restless Ukraine, Nikita Khruschev, the bald, belligerent Soviet premier of my childhood, is not as well described. I hope that Montefiore is at work on a book about the post-Stalin era.

If anything, learning about the Soviet Union of this era gives the American reader a greater appreciation for our form of government, despite all its faults. "Court of the Red Tsar" also serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of ideology run amuck. Once ideology becomes the basis of power, the powerful will mold ideology to serve its political needs, making anyone who stands in their way an ideological opponent and therefore Enemy of the State. Five stars for Sovietologists and students of 20th century history. Four stars for more casual fans of non-fiction as the relentness brutality of the Soviet regime may wear the reader out.

Note to Kindle readers. The many fascinating photographs that are interspersed in the print edition are grouped together in the back of the Kindle edition.

I wanted to know more about Stalin and the Soviet system during World War 2, so I picked this up. I was not disappointed. This is a well-researched and well-documented recounting of the inner workings of the Politburo under Stalin. At times it reads a little dryly, but the tyranny, cruelty, and indiscriminate killings by this paranoid dictator clearly show through. This man, more than any other in the Soviet Union, sent millions of innocent people (including his own family members) to their deaths, made the lives of tens of million others miserable beyond belief, and apparently never lost much sleep over it. His Politburo minions simply did what he said, knowing they were just buying time until Stalin eventually framed and then executed them. If you want to see the results of uncontrolled and unchecked power, this is the book for you. I never thought I would say this, but this man (Stalin) was as bad if not worse than Hitler. And that's saying a lot!

The book is so comprehensive, well researched, and written with such deep knowledge of the subject matter that it puts everything else written about Stalin and his posse to shame.

This book is not, specifically, a biography of Stalin. It skims through his formative years. I understand that Mr. Montefiore wrote another book to fill that gap. This book is about Stalin and his "court". The parade of characters and the endless sequence of them being promoted, falling out of grace, being shot or exiled is absolutely riveting. The author paints a startling portrait of certain characters whom mainstream history has accepted as tolerable. For example, Khruschev's gory deeds are tallied in detail, along with his denunciation of Stalin and others in an attempt to rinse his hands of blood by shoving all responsibility onto the dead men.
The portraits of a succession of NKVD/KGB chiefs are stunning; they challenged my assumptions. Beria, for example, appears to be less of a monster than I previously thought him to be when juxtaposed against the rest of the "court", and often the only person who was not Stalin's sycophant and was thus able to reason logically and take lead of situations.

The lifestyles of the party elite are described methodically and with detail. The all-night parties at Stalin's "dacha", the mandatory drinking, the cheating and betraying - this is better than fiction.
Great book.

Eventually it may come to pass that conventional wisdom among historians will be that there is no more influential or terrible figure in Russian history- outdoing even Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or Catherine the Great- than Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvil who as a young Bolshevik took the name Stalin [Russian for steel]. The life of Stalin has been visited many times by historians, biographers, in memoirs by those who knew him. A picture emerges of a calculating, Machiavellian paranoid committed to a state enforced regime of communism but above all committed to the elimination of real and perceived `enemies' who stood in the way of his complete grasp of power.

Simon Montefiore has done an outstanding job in revisiting the life of Stalin viewed through the lens of his personal life. What emerges is a more human view [if one can use that term for a man responsible for the most deaths of the 20th century] of the life of Stalin. Montefiore shows Stalin the father, the husband and the in-law. And what an in-law he was. Traumatized by the suicide of his second wife Nadya, Stalin becomes increasingly morose and irritated by her family. To that end most ended up being arrested and dying within the Gulag system, rather than protecting them, their ties to Stalin and the intimacy that comes with it is responsible for their deaths.

Montefiore highlights how the inner circle of Russia's leadership strove to guess and to carry out their leader's policies. Stalin, the master manipulator, played his inner circle against each other. To be within the leadership was an honor and a dangerous place. One's fate and the fate of his family was tied to Stalin's mercurial attitude. On several occasions his sycophants wives were arrested [Malenkov, Proskrebychev] and kept in confinement or shot with their husbands remaining on with Stalin continuing with their work. It was not uncommon for high ranking members such as Beria, Malenkov and Kruschev to inquire with Stalin's repulsive secretary Proskrebychev on his mood before entering his office in order to brace themselves for his outbursts, outbursts that could lead to one's demise if not handled correctly. In one well-known story a famous Russian pilot and Air Force general responded to an outburst with a drunken accusation that it was Stalin's fault that planes were unsatisfactory. Within a week he was arrested and perished within the NKVD [secret police] headquarters.

What Montefiore draws is a man who acts much like a vindictive Georgian clan leader. His inner circle are expected to keep the same excrutiating hours as he did- going to bed daily at 6 am- to feast with him at 2 am [Kruschev called these dinners hell] and as he grew older, to drink heavily. No one was excused and no one wanted to allow the others much time alone with Stalin. The irony is he kept those around him in such a state of fear that when he suffered a stroke his guards were too afraid to even enter his home to inquire about why he had not ventured out all day.

This is an excellent study into his personal affairs and Montefiore did his homework, interviewing family members, reading correspondence and official documents. This isn't the first Stalin biography one must visit, others by Ulam, Tucker and Deutcher are recommended. But it does illuminate these political biographies and is certainly less `gossipy' then the entertaining Radzinsky biography of Stalin.

Highly recommended.

In the second volume of Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography of Stalin (though, this book came out before the recently-released "Young Stalin"), the author picks up in 1930-32 around the time that Stalin took strong control of the Soviet state following Lenin's death in 1924 and the ensuing struggle for power. "Stalin: The Court of Red Tsar" is written precisely as the title suggests: it gives not only an intimidate chronicle of Stalin's later life and ruthless leadership of the Soviet Union, but tells its story within the larger context of Stalin's "court" of loyalists, sycophants, relatives, friends, enemies, and perceived enemies. As a result, we are left with not just a book about the dictator himself -- a story which is by itself great -- but also about the entire leadership structure of the Bolshevik empire from its inception until Stalin's death in 1953 in all of its slimy, cruel glory.

"The Court of the Red Tsar" is all at once a superbly-researched, unique, and special book. On the cover of my paperback edition, the Time Magazine review calls the book history "as a kind of savage gossip," and I don't think you could pen a better one-line summary of the book. This book doesn't present a historical sketch of Stalin and his circle in an entirely conventional way; rather, it relies on a wealth of details, interviews, and other tidbits of information that other historians might not have uncovered or ultimately used because they are somewhat unseemly or seemingly inconsequential. Additionally, these juicy pieces of history (or gossip, depending on your view) make this book much more fun to read!

If you're looking for a detailed look at the Soviet Union's military strategy in the Battles of Moscow and Kursk, look elsewhere. Indeed, the author dedicates very little in the way of describing and analyzing the key battles and military strategies employed during the Second World War. The book instead provides an astonishingly intimidate look at Stalin that I think would be almost impossible to top. Montefiore's research and prose ultimately provide us with an incredibly close view of Stalin, his nature, his motivations, and his interactions with and destruction of many of those around him.

In the end, the picture we get of Stalin from the book is remarkably thorough and deep, but at the same it is broadly empty and enigmatic. In other words, we learn much about every major event and day in the Supremo's life, but don't a final sense of Stalin the man -- what drove him to commit the atrocities he did and what were his emotions on many of these acts, including the torture and murder and hundreds of his friends and family members? These questions are left unanswered not because of any deficiency in the book or by the author, but rather because Stalin himself was so secretive and rarely verbally expressed or wrote down his inner most emotions. Throughout his whole life, he led through intrigue, intimations, and direct contractions.

Coming away from the book, I think the best way I could describe Stalin is that he was Hitler, but with ample charisma and even some likable charm. Unlike the prudish Fuhrer who neither drank nor ate meat, "The Court of the Red Tsar" is replete with hundreds of delicious stories of Stalin's massive, sumptuous dinners with his lackeys, his strange work and sleep habits, his penchant for movies, his micromanagement of the smallest inner workers of the Soviet government, his drinking sessions and banter with his associates, his ability to turn close associates into hated enemies at the drop of a hat, and of course his dysfunctional -- and that is putting it kindly -- family life.

There are assuredly many dozens of biographies of Stalin, but I find it tough to believe that any could provide as detailed and unique a description of his life that Montefiore provides in this book and his recent study "Young Stalin". Both are fine reads, and worthy of considerable praise. Despite this book's length -- it is nearly 700 pages, and in very small print (at least in the recent paperback edition) -- it is an easy read, and a book that you will find tough to put down.

Five stars.

That Stalin was an evil force in 20th century Russian history is not challenged in this book. What Simon Montefiore's book does make clear is how Stalin managed it. The key is that Stalin did not rely exclusively on fear to rule. After all, Stalin, no less than Hitler, required accomplices. In the case of Stalin, Montefiore demonstrates that "The foundation of Stalin's power in the Party was not fear: it was charm. Stalin possessed the dominant will among his magnates, but they also found his policies congenial." In fact, what must strike most readers is the extent to which Stalin could appear affable and considerate. The children of Stalin's select circle of insiders were uniformly fond of him. And, he appears quite genuinely to have enjoyed the company of children. Stalin had his human side. That capacity for bestowing affection makes the body count on his hands all the more vile, and the admiration he still receives in some quarters, even more bizarre. Making extraordinary use of newly available archival material, Montefiore takes readers inside Stalin's inner circle, the privileged few that enjoyed his close company. Of course no one in that set was completely at ease. How could they be? Stalin's paranoia was the elephant that followed him to every room. I cannot imagine a more realistic portrait of Stalin in his time than that which Montefiore delivers here.

And, one might add, was grieved, hysterically, upon his death, even by those he had imprisoned and tortured, and is still much admired by many Russians to this day.

This unforgettable biography of Josef Stalin reads almost like a Dostoyevskian novel--the study of an idealistic tyrant who did the worst things possible for what he believed were the best reasons, a human being shockingly not so different than you or I, albeit raised to the highest power and therefore able to exercise his tendencies to their logical all-too-human extremes. What Montefiore's massive and meticulously documented book illustrates is a Stalin who's not simply the cruel, mustachioed "man of steel" popularly--and properly--villainized, but a flesh-and-blood mortal who had his good points as well as his horrific. Why this should come as a surprise is surprising, but it does. One cannot forget--or help but sympathize--the grief of a man so riven by his wife's suicide that he's found sitting in a darkened room weeping and muttering curses, the wall at which he's been spitting for hours covered with saliva. That Stalin was not literally the personification of evil leaves us to ponder the truly terrifying proposition that the atrocities he committed--so often in the name of good--were not the outcome solely of a deranged mind, but a potential inherent in each of us.

One of the most fascinating--if not inexplicable--aspects of this story is how Stalin himself managed to avoid a coup and/or assassination when he created such an atmosphere of terror among even his trusted associates that literally anyone could be arrested and executed at literally any time. Somehow Stalin was able to work one faction off another so effectively that no one made a serious attempt to eliminate him. But exactly how this was achieved and for so long is something Montefiore doesn't hazard to explain.

The crimes of the Stalin regime are appalling. One would hardly think it possible to say, but they dwarf even the crimes of Hitler. One is left wondering how Churchill could have presented Stalin with an honorary sword commending his heroic leadership or how FDR could have flirted for Stalin's favor at Yalta. How could the Allies have been allies with this mass murderer? Are Stalin's crimes against humanity less well known than Hitler's *because* he was on our side during WW2? To have been allied with Stalin--even against Hitler--was morally no less reprehensible than being allied with Hitler against Stalin would have been.

For the attentive reader, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is filled with moral dilemmas. Not the least of which is the indisputable idealism and conviction of Stalin and his confederates. As committed Bolsheviks, these men truly believed, especially at the beginning, of the rightness of their cause. By starving to death millions, Stalin was able to bring Russia into the 20th century and make her a superpower. It was, in his view and the view of the Soviet leadership, an acceptable sacrifice to make for a long-term benefit. Is that sort of thinking really any different than Truman's decision to drop two atomic bombs on the civilian populations of a doomed Japan to hypothetically save American lives? Or, as Stalin believed, were Hiroshima and Nagasaki really a warning directed at Stalin to check Soviet ambition in the coming division of spoils after the war?

As one reads of the endless orders of executions--lists often numbering thousands at a time--one is reminded of Stalin's famous saying "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths only a statistic." And yet this man was no brutal ignoramus but a voracious reader of history, literature, and philosophy. Stalin was an intellectual. He composed party slogans, drafted Soviet policy and theory, personally reviewed and revised the work of leading Soviet poets, playwrights, and filmmakers. He killed millions and relaxed listening to Mozart piano concertos. Clearly being well-read, intelligent, creative, hard-working and highly-cultured is no guarantee of moral supremacy.

Nor is loving one's family.

Not only Stalin, but even the most sadistic killers in his circle who carried out his murderous purges are shown putting in a long day at the office torturing enemies and ordering the executions of enemies of the State and then going home to play affectionately with their children and tenderly with their wives and mistresses. How can you explain something as seeming schizophrenic as that? Montefiore doesn't try, nor is it his job to explain human nature. Instead, with wit and drama, he tells the story of Stalin and his court that rivets the reader from virtually the first page--the strange night that Stalin's beloved second wife Nadya killed herself. An event that Montefiore implies was the decisive turning point in Stalin's ruthless career and "inhuman" pursuit of world-historical eminence.

Fascinating, tragic, thought-provoking, this is history that informs and entertains and often leaves the reader breathless. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a chilling account of humanity at its worst and its most ordinary that will likely leave you astounded at just how absolutely human these monsters really were.

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!!!

A detailed and mostly engrossing look at the great sociopath. Fairly even-handed, and Sebag Montefiore is acknowledged as a leading Stalin expert. It showed some interesting sides of the man, who doted over his granddaughter (daughter?) at Sochi while planning pogroms and murdering huge swaths of his citizens by depriving some of food at his whim. It's a clear example of how good and bad coexist in all of us. (That's not to say that Stalin wasn't evil. Just that an evil man can truly adore his family.)

Montefiore's impressing book presents the story about Joseph Stalin and all his subordinates in the circles of Soviet power between 1932 and Stalin's death in 1953. It is a story of power, red, ruthless, total power.

Montefiore has gone to a wide range of new sources. He has searched far in the newly opened KGB-archives in Russia, and interviewed some of the men in power, and a lot of their descendants, first class observers during two decades of terror and tyrrany.

Stalin managed to stay in the top position for so long by distributing the power between his cronies. He frequently moved them around, both positionally and geographically. Stalin constantly collected "evidence" of contra-revolutionary activity by every member of the Politburo, of the Central Committee, in the Army Command and in the secret police. After a few years in power, most of the magnates ended up accused of sabotage against bolshevism, found guilty (pleading guilty after torture, often by their earlier comrades), and killed. This hindered a build-up of an oppositional coalition.

The role of chief killer was initially held by Yagoda, who was killed by his successor Nikolai Yezhov, killed by his successor Berija. Berija outlived Stalin, but was on the verge of being killed himself. Instead, Berija was executed at the orders of Khrushchev shortly after Stalin's own, natural, death.

According to Montefiore, Stalin started to believe all the accusations that was made up. When he died, he was busy planning a purge against doctors and jews.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. May Stalinism rest, but not in peace. Thank capitalism and liberalism for this excellent book.

What an utterly fascinating portrait the author draws of this monster. I used to think Hitler was interesting, but this blood-thirsty maniac is the one. Talk about fascinating fascism. Stalin, we are told by our communist friends, was the illiterate boob who stole the revolution from the bright and interesting Trotsky and Lenin. Here he is shown to have been every bit as bright as any other mass killers, but in this biography we are shown stages of rage, as it were, whereby Stalin developed finally into the yellow-eyed, paranoid fanatic left-wing academics love to defend. What is so interesting is his intellectual pretensions. His close involvement with authors and composers is fascinating, especially when one considers that his displeasure meant certain death for the discredited. Now there's an editorial policy! At the same time one has to take seriously the author's persuasive claim that it was Stalin's wife's suicide that finally brought an end to any restraint to the Kremlin's killing machine. One is even touched by the descriptions of the informality of the pre-suicide Kremlin, with an old-fashioned style of communal living. They had all lived like wolves in a pack for a while, and then like jackels.

After reading the author's "Young Stalin," this was an interesting continuation of the story. Chilling, with grisly details. It felt like I was there. Though there were more names than I could remember, I did get familiar with the main players, for example, Molotov, Beria, and Khrushchev. My main complaint about the book was the excessive use of pronouns such as "he" when it was often not clear who "he" was referring to, as several men had just been mentioned. So I often had to go back to the previous sentence or paragraph and try to figure out who "he" referred to. This was a frustration throughout the book. A simple repetition of the name would have been clearer. Otherwise, the book was very informative and worth reading.

Countless books have been written about Stalin, and Russia's years under Communism, but this is a unique account of the personal lives of Stalin, and the member's of his Bolshevik court. Montefiore has had access to Russian libraries and their vast collections of documents and letters, and has had the good fortune of being able to interview the descendants of some of the principals of the communist government. In reading the book we are privy to letters going forth from Stalin to family members such as daughter Svetlana, and to members of his inner circle: Molotov, Beria, Mikoyan, etc.

Here's what I found fascinating about this particular volume of history. We learn about people who have deep affection for family and friends, yet have no difficulty in seeing to the murder of millions of their citizens. It's another example of Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. Killing people becomes part of one's job, and one often solicits sympathy from the leader for the heavy workday burden of torturing and killing.

Extreme paranoia develops during the mid thirties, and people are tortured to confess their supposed plots against the government. When you are tortured for names of accomplices how do you get them to stop hurting you despite the fact that you really have no names to give them? Why you just start giving the names of other innocent people. Those people are then tortured for more names, and you have a sort of chain letter going, that presumably could eliminate everyone in the country if time and manpower were not restricting factors. You read about this and marvel at the horrible silliness of it all.

Stalin has often been pictured as a boorish, simple minded thug. Thug yes, but Montefiore informs us that he was actually quite the intellectual possessing a massive library. He constantly read history and the classics, and delighted in conversing with others on the merits of literature, music, and history. And, he had an excellent singing voice.

My only small complaint is that Montefiore doesn't find the gross murdering, drinking, and womanizing behavior of Stalin's minions to be enough to tarnish their reputation. He constantly has to apply pejorative adjectives to his references to them: fat, obese, ugly, etc. Anyone 5' tall or less is unremittingly referred to as a midget. We get the physical impression the first time they are described; why keep it up?

It doesn't matter how many books you might have read on this era of Russian history, this book is different from them all, and has to be read. And if 800 plus pages seems too long, I should point out that the actual text is only 650 pages.

Having read a number of Stalin biographies already, I was surprised by how much new detail was contained in Montefiore's book. I for one never heard before the story of how Stalin may have been inspired by Hitler's successful purge of the SA to murder Kirov and start the first great purge, or how he allowed not only his closest "friends" to be arrested and/or executed, but even numerous members of his late wife's family, his daughter-in-law and even his former mistress. While I was well aware of Stalin's glacial cautiousness before this, I still found myself astonished to see how consistently he consulted his ruling circle on virtually every significant decision he made, and how rigorously he maintained the fiction of merely being the first among equals long after he had become the most feared and powerful individual in human history. Nor was I aware that Stalin's planned purge of the Jews was driven not so much by traditional anti-semiticism as his perception that they would be fifth columnists for American interests, based upon his belief that Jews exercised influence over the American government, an idea far more prevalent today in anti-American circles than in 1952. Finally, I was impressed with the richness of the portraits of the 20 or so "grandees" through whom Stalin ruled from 1929 to 1953, and the odd mixture of Saddam-like carrot and stick through which he alternatively encouraged and terrorized them to execute his will. While Lavrentia Beria, the most ruthless, brillant and, surprisingly, liberal of Stalin's entourage, and the doggedly loyal Molotov are the most completely captured personalities, lesser figures like A.A. Kutesnov and N.V. Voznesensky (the former Zhadanov proteges purged in the Leningrad Affair) also emerge from the shadows. My only disappointment is how little we learn of Khruschev, despite his key role in the post-WWII Soviet government. Hopefully Montefiore will follow up on this powerful work by casting his cold bright light upon the shark fight between Stalin's heirs following his demise.

This biography is excellent in portraying Stalin's character and what live was like for those who had the fortune/misfortune to live in close proximity to him. The author has added to the knowledge about Stalin both by his access to materials in Soviet archives, and his interviews with children of persons in Stalin's circle, or in a few cases, with individuals who worked with Stalin and were still alive. The result is a more complete depiction of Stalin as a human being, instead of a villain out of a bad thriller.

The author is not a revisionist. If he shows Stalin being kind on individual occasions, he also shows him having hundreds of thousands murdered, including many people who were personal friends.

I don't give the book five stars because the author assumes the reader knows about larger issues such as the conduct of World War II, the ideological battles among the Bolsheviks, and the consequences of Stalin's policies among the population. Of course, if this had been done, the book would have been much, much longer.

In fairness, the author acknowledges that Stalin's drive for collectivization led to famines that killed millions, but this is disposed of in a few sentences. In contrast, the effects of Stalin's paranoia on the Bolsheviks is given greater detail. It's important to remember that many of the upper level officials that Stalin had killed or imprisoned were themselves responsible for summary execution of innocent people who were deemed wreckers or opponents of the regime.

Finally, the book is extremely well written -- not the work of a dry academic. Anyone who finds this era fascinating should follow-up with additional books about Stalin and his lieutenants.

This biography falls short on a few counts. It does not describe Stalin's rise to power in much detail. It never really states "After the vote of ----, 1932, Stalin officially held the offices of -----, ----, and ----. This meant he could not be outvoted or removed from power unless -----. Next, it does not really describe the full functions of Stalin's inner circle that well. The author mentions Mikoyan, for example, many times, but never really says what Mikoyan (or Voroshilov, or Malenkov, or...) did aside from his formal office (which is only mentioned once). Third, Stalin's role as warlord and supreme commander of the red army is not described very well. The author makes it very clear that Stalin worked extensively during the war, but says very little about his interrelations with his Generals, Stavka, the use of STalin's pseudonym "Vasiliev", and other things. It says only a little about Stalin's interrelations with Roosevelt and Churchill, and mistakenly says that Stalin admired Churchill. The opposite was actually true, and Stalin nearly had Roosevelt killed. A more appropriate title for the book would have been THE COURT OF THE RED CZAR: THE SOVIET UNION UNDER STALIN'S REIGN.

But enough of the bad stuff. This book provides an excellent description of Stalin's personal life, the best I have ever read. Neither Volkogonov's nor Radzinsky's Stalin biographies describe Stalin's family life this well. The collegiality of Stalin and the Bolsheviks comes alive here. The Great Terror is described very well. And perhaps the best part of the book is the description of Stalin's demise. Provided here is a nearly moment-by-moment description of how Stalin died. The other available biographies are much less descriptive, and seemingly less accurate. FOUR SOLID STARS!!

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a fascinating look at the inner workings of Stalin, the Soviet Politburo and the CPSU during the period 1930-1953. The author, renowned historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, provides a tour de force, based upon newly revealed Soviet-era documents and interviews with surviving members of the Soviet inner circle. The level of frank brutality, viciousness and paranoia in this book will shock even readers familiar with the Soviet and Nazi regimes of this era (e.g. Stalin ordering a pregnant woman to be beaten, children being arrested and tortured for remarks made). The detail provided on the blood-drenched NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria is particularly difficult to read without becoming nauseous. Nevertheless, this is one of the best books that I have read this year and the author is to be applauded for providing much fresh insight into this period.

Much of the details of this book have been provided in numerous other reviews so I will focus on only a few areas. Although the Red Army is somewhat tangential to the main flow of the narrative, it does become an important issue during the purges of 1937-41 and the Great Patriotic War. The author's insight on the relative contributions of Budyonny, Voroshilov (truly laughable at times - almost beyond belief), Kulik, Zhukov and Andrei Zhdanov (Leningrad Party boss) are quite revealing. Unfortunately, there are many Soviet military commanders who are barely mentioned (Konev, Rokossovsky, Chuikov) and it would have been interesting to see more about how Stalin played favorites.

At times the military detail is not quite up to snuff, like when the author employs outdated myths about the "400,000 Siberians" who arrived suddenly to save Moscow. In fact, Zhukov received only a portion of the Siberian reinforcements and they arrived over a period of months, not days. Even though the author lists David Glantz's ground-breaking research on the Eastern Front, here and there it is apparent that he ignored Glantz's information. However, these are purist details that might annoy the specialist reader, but will pass unnoticed by the general reader.

Overall, this is a truly worthwhile book about one of the worst bunch of people to ever run the government of a major country. The section on Stalin's war on the peasants during collectivization are particularly revealing about the inherent criminality of this regime. My only real disappointment with the book is that it comes to a very abrupt end with Stalin's death, with little attempt to offer a historical appraisal of Stalin's regime. To be fair, the author does provide glimpses of his opinions embedded in the text, but there is no overall assessment. A key question that was studiously avoided - lest perhaps modern European communists might take umbrage - was whether it was only Stalin, Beria and a few of others who share much of the blame for the brutality of this regime or was this predilection for violent solutions inherent in the system that Lenin forced on Russia.

Since others already discuss its strengths and weaknesses, I'll simply give my impressions of this book: it draws a powerful portrait of a virtual psychopath who was not that truly loved by either one of his actually-immoral parents: an alcoholic, education-hating father who however had the same passion for violence as the mother; the mother being unscrupulous on top of adulterous, disdaining of her husband to the point of becoming an actual Carmen while seeking to do things to make her son not to be a younger version of his father - and encouraging Soso to be likewise unprincipled and ready to junk friends the way she junked lovers!

Little wonder (on top of how brutal, willful, passionate, very Mediterranean Grúzijans {Georgians} happen to be - just like Southern-Italians, above all Sicilians) that this man, capable of real generosity but without either genuine intellectual or emotional depth, ready to dispatch people perceived in the slightest to be enemies (even if without any real cause to so think logically) to the cruellest of fates (bullets in the backs of their heads and/or (beforehand obviously!) working themselves to literal deaths in the taiga, tundra or deserts of the boundless expanses of "Mother Russia", turned out the way he did. His ego was so boundless that literally ANYBODY who was praised (no matter how fairly - Kiróv and Zhúkov are both good examples) without being openly made to be subservient to "Uncle Joe" was automatically marked out for future evil (as happpened with Zhúkov and beforehand Rïkov, Bukhárin, Zinóviev!); simultaneously, anybody who saw his weak sides (as happened when his last wife Nadjézhda shot herself) was likewise marked for woe. His good sides in such moments were just too dangerously vulnerable to be tolerated for others to see (his paranoia presupposed absolutely everybody to be pretty well automatically evil, it would seem)!!!

This modern-day Richard III (amongst other things - however, he certainly was no Napoleon or Augustus - his playing around with while persecuting great Soviet composers like Prokófjjev and Shostakóvich, other artistic personalities like Jesjéñin, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and so many, many others attest to that!), himself not without talent both as a poet and as a singer (in the eyes of at least some - certainly his favouring the music of Chaykóvskiy and Rakhmáñinov {whom he wanted to return to Russia - fortunately that great composer knew better!!!} isn't merely a question of bourgeois taste!), is more than a little fascinating - and Montefiore does an outstanding job of revealing the full complexities of this Antichrist's character, feelings of foreignness (a Georgian in the midst of a Russo-Jewish society) and almost-perpetual paranoia which only got worse as he aged, somebody who insisted on his vision of not only Communism but of how people were supposed to be virtual robots to his whims. He could pretend to really care about others, but WOE to those who really trusted him with their troubles!!! Montefiore's research is exhaustive, his conclusions well-argued, his drawing of the characters of that ogre's subordinates (e.g., Mólotov, Voroshílov, Bjérija) is masterful and not one false note seems to be present in my eyes! [I admit not to being much of an intellectual myself - and maybe it's for the better given Ljéñin's brutal yet all-too-often just opinion of them as being not the "brains of the nation but the s***." Of course, that means that I can't argue all that well my reasons for liking this book where others may see weaknesses. However, what you read here is my honest opinion, regardless...]

[At the risk of my being considered anti-Semitic, much as that's not in the least how I really am or see things, it must be pointed out that Jews, having been particularly severely persecuted by the Carjs and the Russian people, were outstanding cannon-fodder for the Communist system and were deeply influential both in bringing about its formation and being a fair part of its backbone via such people as Kagánovich, Kámjeñev, Tróckiy and Zinóviev. Eventually, Stáljin became outrightly anti-Semitic and was out to turn the "Doctors' Purge" of 1952 into an outright anti-Jewish pogrom that would be used to cover his elimination of old favourites he saw as being too powerful and so needing to be dispatched with (Bjérija, Mólotov, Mikoján and possibly both Kagánovich and Máljenkov), as he had done in times past - however, these people knew his strategies and tactics so they knew what he had in mind and were therefore in an outstanding position to eliminate him - good riddance!!!!]

All in all, as one reads of his (and his subordinates') egomania, brutality, contempt for those underneath them (all too often to be used and jettisoned like Kleenex!), etc., one realises that this book is PURE POISON for one's soul (in some ways, Stáljin was a model, more than enough other figures, for "Il Principe" by Machiavelli - who didn't write that book as a way he personally believed in the slightest!!) while being very edifying for one's intellectual capacity. One can understand something of why Stáljin was driven to be what and who he was without however ending up condoning anything of the pure EVIL he did and was as a human being.

For anybody whose personality has already been formed and is safely ensured against becoming anything of Stáljin's sort (that's something I NEVER want to see happen thanks to any reviews of mine!), I can recommend this book as basic reading on character study as well as Russo-Soviet history - absolutely belongs in any serious reader's library!!! At the same time, whoever reads this had better be able to quickly turn to more spiritual reading (the Bible, "Imitation of Christ", "Introduction to the Devout Life" are the books that come to my mind) so as to stop any risk of becoming anything like who Soso became - Generalissimo "Stáljin, the Great Leader & Teacher, Guiding Light of Communism" (among so many, many other vain titles he chose for himself - yuk!!!!)... [In the wrong hands, this book can be downright dangerous, alas!!!]

Simon Montefiore has succeeded in creating one of the finest political autobiographies ever written of a twentieth century Soviet leader. In fact, through a blend of superb description, action, dialogue, and insight, this is one of the few books I have read that made me feel I was actually there, sharing the incomparable craziness that swirled around Joseph Stalin.

From painstaking research, with no stones left unturned, we begin to understand from the very beginning, how Stalin inherited Lenin's mantle with all the distrust and petty jealousies, slights, and stupidity, which created the paranoia that came to characterize the rise of the Soviet Union. Yet, behind the scenes, we see the different sides of Stalin: his camaraderie, artistic qualities, and attempts at historical and literary mastery, rewriting pieces in terms of classic Marxist-Leninism; and the gradual assumption of materialism that was a hallmark of the Tsars. Here also is the much of the basis for Orwell's 1984 vision.

For a great deal of the early to mid twentieth century, the USSR had arguably one of the finest intelligence-gathering apparatus, yet many of the results were discarded at the top through distrust, paranoia, and the desire not to overly upset certain western powers, lest the Soviet Union be perceived as a repressed state. The classic picture: Stalin's total shock when Operation Barbarossa commenced when it was clear the western powers knew what was coming down.

The beginnings of the Great Terror are also described in gory detail, a competition amongst Stalin's cronies to outdo each other and curry favor with the Vozhd. In a total dog-eat-dog world, it was a question of denounce, torture, murder, or end up as a victim, which happened to many of Stalin's contemporaries anyway. The sheer scale of the arrests, brutal torture, liquidations, and deportations to slave-labor camps is mind boggling: the momentum carrying the process on, decade after decade. The labors of Yagoda, Beria, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and Molotov are all chronicled.

Yet Montefiore depicts the love and familial relationships of Stalin's "extended family" in such detail that we can almost sympathize with the participants amidst the drunken debauchery, sexual promiscuity, and materialistic excesses. When Nadya commits suicide, we see how Stalin reacts to this "betrayal." We follow Stalin's angst as he watches Svetlana grow up and marry the wrong people. And sometimes we see glimpses that Stalin recognizes the terrible damage he has wrought over the country, but is unable to control.

Don't plan on much extracurricular activity while you read this book; your friends will be disappointed.

In this long and entertaining book, British author Simon Sebbag Montefiore tells the story of Stalin from the moment that his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1932 until his death in 1953 (like many historians and many of his closest collaborators, Montefiore believed the death of his wife exacerbated the worst of his personality and turned him from a strong ruler to a brutal dictator, making the great purges possible). In a subsequent book (a prequel of sorts), Young Stalin, he recounted the life of the Soviet dictator from his birth in 1878 until the triumph of the Russian revolution in 1917. Left from these two books is an intermediate period of fifteen years, from 1917 to 1932, in which Stalin rose to power, and wasn't still a complete dictator: even after he became the Soviet nominal leader in 1924 after Lenin died, there was considerable opposition to his policies and he didn't have a completely free hand to govern. He would take care of these opponents (and then more) in 1937.
As Montefiore notes at the beginning, during the Cold War, Soviet top officials were routinely characterized in the western press as being grey, mediocre and dull. In fact, most of them had colorful, larger than life personalities: Yezhov the manic and bloody dwarf responsible for the worst of the repressions, Beria an intelligent but cold blooded murderer who terrorized the leadership with his Georgian gang of criminals at the security services and who after the death of the Boss was an unlikely supporter of the liberalization of the regime, Budyonny the Cossack cavalry general famous for his moustaches who believed that tanks would never be a match for horses in warfare, Tukhachevsky the military intellectual who tried to modernize the Red Army and who would pay dearly for being in the wrong side of Stalin during the Polish Soviet war, Khrushchev the Ukrainian peasant who far from a liberal was one of the most bloody minded of the Soviet leaders, Ordzhonikidze the fiery old pal from Georgia and considered the "perfect Bolshevik" who killed himself in early 1937 apparently for sensing that he was next in the execution's list, Nikolai Bukharin the vain intellectual and old friend of Stalin (but also opponent of many of his policies) who sensing his coming demise send increasingly pathetic letters to the leader pleading for mercy, Mikoyan the urbane Armenian who despite some momentary arguments with Stalin survived in the top leadership until the times of Brezhnev.
Top officials of the Soviet Union were a close knit group, they usually live next to one another, usually hanging with each other after work and on vacation. Some of them were even related by marriage (Stalin's daughter Svetlana flirted with Beria's son, but finally was married to Zhdanov's son; in an earlier time, Kamenev's was married to Trotsky's sister). Their familiarity made even more haunting the fact that many voted in Politburo's sessions for the death of their former friends.
Stalin obviously holds the greatest responsibility for the great terror, but he wasn't the only one: Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov signed most of the death sentences, and there are many documents in which they seemed to try to sincerely encourage the Soviet leader to repress and kill even more people. For these men, though, even being this close to Stalin didn't save you from the repressions: Kaganovich's brother Mikhail was one of the victims of the terror, and after the war, Molotov's Jewish wife Polina was imprisoned for several years in a labor camp during the campaign after rootless cosmopolitans (i.e. Jews). Even some members of Stalin's direct family were repressed: Alexander Svanidze, his brother in law from his first marriage and a top official of the Soviet State Bank, was executed in 1941 with the flimsy charges of being a German spy.
Stalin didn't mellow with age. If anything, he became more cruel and arbitrary as he got older and death got near. When around the time he turned seventy he started suffering the infirmities of age, he didn't blame nature, but (of course) a conspiracy by doctors. Many of them were Jews (and the recent birth of the state of Israel made him doubt whether Soviet Jews were loyal to the Soviet state), hence, the last campaign of repression (thankfully stopped short by the dictator's death, just before they were sent to camps in Siberia) were against Jews.
If you want to know what made Stalin tick, what were the roots of his remarkable but terrifying personality, Young Stalin is a better book. But this book, which is full of new information, is a very entertaining retelling of what became almost a surreal kingdom of fear, abject obedience and death.

Stalin has been the subject of many interpretations and some decent biographical sketches. Nevertheless Stalin, the man, has remained largely clouded in mystery, like something that haunts Russian history. Here fort he first time Stalin is unmasked and his daily life is brought into the open. This intensely personal biography delves into the inner circle of Stalin's `court'. From Mikoyan to Molotov, Khrushchev, Kagonovich to others like Beria and Zhdanov. Here is the intensely intimate portrait of a nation, a people, and a group of leaders who rose to power in the late 20s and early 30s. Stalin and his friends participated in a mass psychosis, one that came to grip the entire country as the Great Terror and the Purges accelerated. As literally millions were shipped to the Gulags to work on such inane projects as the White Sea Canal, Stalin and his circle remained ever in control, but ever intriguing against one another. This book covers every year and almost every great gathering in detail not hum drum "he went to lunch and then to bed" but in shocking irreverent portraits of how these characters circulated amongst one another and how they related to the country. The most fascinating aspect of this is the intentions of the title `Red Tsar'. Stalin believed that the Tsar had controlled the country with 300,000 minor nobility and Stalin intended to control the country with roughly 300,000 political officers. In the end Stalin and his court mirrored the court of Ivan the Terrible or Catherine the Great. Very little had changed.
Although Politics and Foreign affairs and the war is touched on it is not the main point of the biography. The main point of this biography is to try to understand, nay to experience, the inner workings of the Politburo and the Kremlin under Comrade Stalin. Other biographies such as Volkoganovs have served as eye openers into `secret' portions of Stalin's life, while Conquests `Breaker of Nations' delved into Stalin's Gulags and foreign affairs. But this is the first serious biography that allows the reader to understand the Russianess and the uniquely Russian traits that haunted the Soviet leaders. Far from being revolutionary communists these men embodied the very spirit of Russia, from the standard suspicions to the shadow that history cast upon them. Any Russophile or anyone with interest in Russia will love this biography, and anyone even mildly interesting in Stalin or his actions will love this biography.
Seth J. Frantzman

This is a fine biography of Stalin. It details his personal life, as opposed to so many of the books which focus on the public face of his political machinations. Beginning with the suicide of his wife, the book threads narratives about Stalin's charm as well as his sinister, murderous malice. It documents his court - the likes of Malenkov, Beria, the power struggles amongst men who were close drinking partners and fierce rivals.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, Montefiore unearths new evidence about Stalin's brutal control over the arts in Russia. His voracious reading habit and close editing of works by writers and composers such as Gorky and Shostakovich.

If anything Montefiore is perhaps a little generous on Stalin, portraying him as a monster with an intellectual charming side. But true thinkers don't boast of reading '500 pages a day', or force their ideas and opinions down other people's throats with savage dominance.

The life and times of Stalin show us how the entire culture and social fabric of a vast society can undergo a collective warp towards the brutal, misplaced 'ideals' of a bullying tyrant. Stalin was a master of creating this personality cult, drawing on a huge range of devices to achieve it. This helps to explain why he continued to be workshipped in Russia long after his death, in a way Hitler never was in Germany.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An in-depth account of the characters, lives and monstrosities of Stalin, his comrades and victims. Montefiore is an interesting writer, his passion for Soviet history is visible in every page, so much so that some of the details are too eccentric - but interesting nonetheless. His initial introduction of Stalin is somewhat kind and compassionate, a Stalin with feelings as a father, husband, son... and then gradually presents the reader the true nature of Stalin's character.

The analyses of the functioning of the Soviet state apparatus are outstanding, every institution is deeply related to the character of the leader, as there was no genuine or rational bureaucracy that functioned in the Soviet higher echelons of power. Montefiore connects events and people like a mystery solver and adds his judgment, which makes it impossible for the reader to disagree.

The book does have some historical errors, one of them being on the first purges on nationalities where the author notes that Macedonians were also part of the "nationality purges" although "Macedonians" did not exist as a nationality in the Soviet Union but rather in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia and at the time were still referred to as "Southern Serbs." In any event, this is an amazing book for anyone interested in the most brutal period of Soviet history.

Once I started reading this book I could barely put it down. The amoral cruelty of the early Bolsheviks, their belief in their own superiority, and their ruthlessness in dealing with enemies, friends, peasants, wives, husbands, children, and siblings caused me to deeply contemplate my own moral code and sense of humanity. Montefiore brilliantly captures the miasma of a time when everyone was expected to inform on everyone and no one was safe from the barrel of a gun against the back of the neck.

Truly, as the author writes, Stalin was "exceptional in every way". Those closest to him had opportunities to stop him but were both fearful of the Vozhd and intensely attracted and devoted to him. As Stalin was the embodiment of Bolshevism his fellow Bolsheviks had neither the courage nor the desire to stop him; even if stopping him was the only way to save their own lives.

Montefiore lays bare the utter moral and ideological bankruptcy of Communism. "The Court of the Red Tsar" demonstrates Communism, as a political system, ideology, religion, or system of government relied solely on terror and cruelty to maintain its stranglehold on the Soviet Union and its satellites. Other works go into the inherent flaws in Bolshevism. Montefiore's work tells how Stalin used fear and terror to keep those flaws from destroying communism during his reign.

At almost 700 pages, 'Stalin: the court of the red Tsar' is the culmination of years of research on the part of the author, Simon Sebag Montefiore. Montefiore has travelled widely in the former USSR and interviewed survivors and descendants of Stalin's circle.

Stalin was an incredibly complex and multi-faceted individual and certainly not the boorish Philistine of Orwell's Animal Farm. The real Stalin was cultured and highly-educated with a sense of humor and even able to laugh at himself. This monster who has the blood of millions on his hand was a loving dad to his daughter Svetlana and objected to sex and kissing in movies. This aborration who used forced starvation and deportation to impose Bolshevik rule on the Soviet peoples was a talented musician, enjoyed canoing holidays and was a keen gardener.

The book is a study of Stalin's character and his relationships with his tragic wife Nadya and his grotesque, blood-thirsty Politburo subordinates. At dramatic moments such as the assassination of Kirov, and Stalin's rather comic double-act routine with Churchill at the Yalta conference, the writing style is close to historical fiction.

My main criticism is its prolixity and inclusion of dozens of minor, detailed anecdotes which drag the book out for about 200 pages more than it could have been. This is not a history of the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It would be of minimal use to students of Soviet history. It is also not recommended if you are at all squeamish - there are some graphic descriptions of torture and human suffering. Above all it leaves the reader shattered and wondering how on Earth such a monstrosity could have been allowed to live for so long.

Many of the reviews citing this book for typos and being poorly written have some credence- this is not by any means a masterpiece. The first 150 or so pages is very slow reading and certain incidents (Stalingrad in particular) do not receive enough detail, while something like listing the members of Politburo families read like the duller parts of the Old Testament.

Regardless, Montefiore's access to the recently opened archives make this an essential read. There is a lot of very interesting and insightful information regarding Stalin and his cronies. Placed against the relief of the domestic lifestyles of the elite, the horrors of Stalinism are placed in strong relief. These were real people and the face of evil often resembles our own. Montefiore's book provides a startling glimpse behind the Iron Curtain.

The book picks up more of a lively voice as the Terror of the late 1930's kicks in. There is also quite a bit of attention given to the post war years, at which time it was practically impossible for the West to know what was going on inside the Soviet Union.

Two days before xmas 2004 a young Australian Federal policeman was fatally shot by an unkown sniper whilst on a tour of duty in the Solomon Islands, SW Pacific. It was a headline. His colleagues stood shoulder to shoulder and wept as his coffin was loaded onto an aircraft for return to Australia. Author Mr Montefiore notes on p.643 of STALIN that " perhaps 20 million had been killed(under Stalin's rule); 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they (Politburo members etc) were still believers." Is the difference between the former and the latter a case of the former being the reaction of a civilized country and the latter an example of a barbaric one? Who knows? Mr Montefiore has chosen an apt title for his work - Stalin acted like a Tsar with total control, terror and giving expression through murder to every whim, anxious thought or "paranoia". For the general reader, this is at once a book resembling the lurid details of a depraved society - cf National Enquirer; at the same time resembling LORD OF THE FLIES where those in power acted like wilful, spoilt, savage children; but with undertones of KING LEAR where men are reduced as to flies to wanton gods. A bizarre read, where the very human side of all is revealed - Mr Roosevelt, Mr Churchill included. Every individual who ever flirted with Communism or Stalinism should read this tome. On the other hand not to distinguish between those of the "left" and supporters of Stalin is to do a criminal disservice to the former, just as it is silly to describe President George W. Bush as a [...]. Yes it is a shocking read, and not for the squeamish or those disgusted by sexual activity of a perverse kind.

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