Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Simon Sebag Montefiore

This is a thoroughly in depth view of Stalin's years in power. It is a slow read for me and quite discouraging to have the book falling apart right from the opening pages. Get another printing or publisher.

On March,9 1953 Stalin's funerals announced the closing of an era. Molotov, Krushev and Beria pronounced the official speeches praising the virtues of the father of Nationalities. It was a great show of unity and official harmony from the workers' paradise, but reality was different from the official show. Stalin had died a lonely man and his heirs had been in the past months a miserable lot of frightened men. * Polina, Molotov's wife, was still in the Lubianka, under interrogation, while her husband had been on the verge to be purged under Stalin's malevolent and dangerous suspicions. Beria had been in disgrace as well and extremely worried for his fate, and life (there is still a lingering suspect he had poisoned Stalin to prevent being outmanoeuvred). Still - relieved as he could be by Stalin's death, he did not know that in a few months he would have been nonetheless eliminated, being too compromised with the past. Krushev had been at times protégé and outcast, but his ability to shade his real feelings and his apparent candidness had saved him more than once from Stalin's congenital distrust. * Molotov, Krushev and Beria represented the last "court of the Red Tsar". They were survivors in an entourage repeatedly decimated by bloody purges that followed - one after the other - since 1937. And they were collectively responsible for atrocities unparalleled but for those of Nazi Germany, and eager - each one separately - to shove off the burden of responsibility on the dead despot. There was no Nuremberg trial for the "murderous magnates". * This essay is both a biography of the red tsar and the story of his courtiers. History of Soviet Russia - unlike that of Nazi Germany - is still too open to disputes to present a common ground of evaluation. Many disagreements rise from lack of first hand reliable sources and the persistence both of Soviet mythology and visceral anti-communist hatred. This is one of the reasons we must be obliged to Simon Sebag Montefiore: he has done an excellent work of research, having had the opportunity to scrutinize declassified official documents of the era and to interview survivors and descendants of the family elites of Stalin's inner circle, an enormous amount of work that inevitably cost the author a good deal of time. * "Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar" is a well written and interesting work. Sebag Montefiore casts new light on Stalin portrait, sometimes in unexpected directions. He is one of the few historians to document the dictator refined intellectual curiosity, spanning from politics to poetry and literature (he even attempted translation of Georgian epics). Stalin was not the brute we've been accustomed from the "revisionist" studies produced by historians like Helene Carrere d'Encausse (in her "Lénine" he is liquidated as little more than a loutish bank robber) and neither the dim-witted monster imagined by most writers (last a popular writer as Robert Harris in his - rather deluding

I was seven years old when Stalin died. His mythic spirit hovered over my childhood in the 50s revolts in Hungary, my parents subdued fear of Senator McCarthy's pogrom & jingoism and the nuns' ceaseless telling of how horrible life would be under Communism & its denial of God. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's angels cleaned his blackboards on national television, a program we watched "religiously," since it added to our misunderstandings of the Iron Curtain. And I have been ever since fascinated by the lives and minds of history's beasts. This strange book reveals a chummy and quaint family of violent & explosive personalities. It is the story of a society that some may find strangely resonant with today. Bolshevism promised a new dynamism for a new world. Lives passed back and forth across tables and mattresses, in and out of dachas, but without any of the half-baked tenderness of the heydays of hippiedom. Any such comparison falls flat when the center of this dynamism always refers back to Stalin.Montefiore makes it quite clear early on that this is no family-values story. All the love letters, children and garden-tending cannot cover up the gut-wrenching tyranny that allowed Stalin to arrest & do away with families of his co-conspirators and then use that sway to eventually do away with his henchmen. Montefiore gives it to us straight: this was a murderous gang of thugs, a kleptocracy of the hell-bound, a celebration of mean-spiritedness & connivance. By the time I got to the last pages & my memories of my life as a "Cold War" child finally caught up with circumstances in the book, I could relax. When Stalin's death came to the pages, I realized that I had survived more than just reading the book. I had survived that time myself. Somewhere between my seventh year and today, everything that the author describes has touched my life, one way or the other.I was reminded of watching TV coverage of German citizens on both sides of the Berlin Wall taking history into their own hands. I could think only of lives cut short and brutalized, lives that weren't long enough to see the end of what Lenin and certainly Stalin had begun. This is a well-written, seriously documented book. The author has taken great pains to collect & organize this extremely important piece of history, far too late in the telling. It's more than a shopping list of the dead, the show trials, the shootings, hangings & pre-arranged automobile accidents. It's the story of one life that cut short 20 million others. It's a story that should be known today, when once again, as Montefiore notes, "'terrorism' simply signified 'any doubt about the policies or character of'" the Great Leader himself.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of many previously closed and sealed records, the earlier history of the USSR and its leader Joseph Stalin can now be told with some belief in its correctness. It is a chilling story, and must have been a constant terror to those of Stalin's circle, who were forced to live with his mercurial temper, rages and paranoia on a daily basis. Of course, it's rather difficult to actually feel sorry for them, because most, if not all, of them were just as bad as their leader. The casual way in which multitudes of innocent men and women were sent to horrible torture and death is absoluting astonishing. This is a very well-written book and is quite thoroughly researched. Anyone interested at all in Russian history in the middle parts of the 20th century should read this book.