Simon Montefiore: Stalin

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

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

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

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

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

“[A] masterful and terrifying account of Stalin as seen within his close entourage…. Seldom has the picture been put in finer focus than by Montefiore.”

“Horrific, revelatory and sobering…. A triumph of research.”

“I loved the totalitarian high baroque sleaze of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin …. One of the 2004 Guardian Books of the Year.”

“A grim masterpiece shot through with lashes of black humor…. The personal details are riveting.”

“A well-researched and insightful book…. The narrative adroitly catches the atmosphere of the time.”

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

“An extraordinary book and Simon Sebag Montefiore might well be one of the very few people who could possibly have written it…. For anyone fascinated by the nature of evil—and by the effects of absolute power on human relationships—this book will provide insights on every page.”

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

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

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

“Spectacular…. An impressive and compelling work, using important new documents.”

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

I have been helped generously by many people in this enterprise from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Sukhumi, from Tbilisi to Buenos Aires and Rostov-on-Don. My aim here was simply to write a portrait of Stalin, his top twenty potentates, and their families, to show how they ruled and how they lived in the unique culture of his years of supreme power. This does not pretend to be a history of his foreign and domestic policies, his military campaigns, his youth or the struggle with Trotsky. This is a chronicle of his court from his acclamation as “the leader” in 1929 to his death. It is a biography of his courtiers, a study of high politics and informal power and customs. In a way, this is a biography of Stalin himself through his relationships with his magnates: he is never off-stage.

My mission was to go beyond the traditional explanations of Stalin as “enigma,” “madman” or “Satanic genius,” and that of his comrades as “men without biographies,” dreary moustachioed sycophants in black-and-white photographs. Deploying the arsenal of new archives and unpublished memoirs, my own interviews, and well-known materials, I hope Stalin becomes a more understandable and intimate character, if no less repellent. I believe the placing of Stalin and his oligarchs in their idiosyncratic Bolshevik context as members of a military-religious “order of sword-bearers” explains much of the inexplicable. Stalin was utterly unique but many of his views and features, such as dependence on death as a political tool, and his paranoia, were shared by his comrades. He was a man of his time, so were his magnates.

Molotov and Beria are probably the most famous of them but many are not well known in the West. Yezhov and Zhdanov gave their names to epochs yet remain shadowy. Some, such as Mekhlis, have hardly been covered even by academics. Mikoyan was admired by many; Kaganovich widely despised. They may have presented a grey mask to the outside world but many were flamboyant, dynamic and larger-than-life. The new access to their correspondence and even their love letters will at least make them live.

In telling their stories, this is inevitably a cautionary tale: of the many mass murderers chronicled here, only Beria and Yezhov were prosecuted (and not for their true crimes). The temptation has been to blame all the crimes on one man, Stalin. There is an obsession in the West today with the cult of villainy: a macabre but inane competition between Stalin and Hitler to find the “world’s most evil dictator” by counting their supposed victims. This is demonology not history. It has the effect of merely indicting one madman and offers us no lesson about either the danger of utopian ideas and systems, or the responsibility of individuals.

Modern Russia has not yet faced up to its past: there has been no redemption, which perhaps still casts a shadow over its development of civil society. Many modern Russians will not thank me for the intimate frankness of a history they would prefer to forget or avoid. While this book certainly does not diminish Stalin’s paramount guilt, it may discourage the convenient fiction of his sole responsibility by revealing the killings of the whole leadership, as well as their own sufferings, sacrifices, vices and privileges. In this chronicle of villains, the only heroes are a few brave poets—and a multitude of forgotten ordinary people.

I have been enormously fortunate in those who have helped me: this book was inspired by Robert Conquest, who has been the most patient, generous supporter and adviser throughout. I am superlatively grateful to Robert Service, Professor of Russian History, Oxford University, who has “supervised” my book with generous encouragement and outstanding knowledge, and whose detailed reading and editing of the text have been invaluable.