Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful
and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his
crimes-as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and
infamous Gulag-has given him the lasting distinction as a
personification of evil in the twentieth century. But though the
facts of Stalin's reign are well known, this remarkable biography
reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the
vast foundation-human, psychological and physical-that supported
and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in
fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him.
In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis
and narrative elan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and
lives of Stalin's court from the time of his acclamation as
"leader" in 1929, five years after Lenin's death, until his own
death in 1953 at the age of seventy-three. Through the lens of
personality-Stalin's as well as those of his most notorious
henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them-the author sheds new
light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by
exterminating the old. He gives us the details of their quotidian
and monstrous lives: Stalin's favorites in music, movies,
literature (Hemmingway, "The Forsyte Saga and "The Last of the
Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took
Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenin's dictum, "A
revolution without firing squads is meaningless"). We see him among
his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at
dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of
the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia andcravenness that
ruled the lives of Stalin's inner court, and we see how the
dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the
awful efficiency of his killing machine.
With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes,
small and large, of all the members of Stalin's court. And he
traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the
relative warmth of Stalin's rule in the early 1930s gives way to
the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II
(there has never been as acute an account of Stalin's meeting at
Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years
when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he
did the rest of his country.
"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented
understanding of Stalin's dictatorship, and, as well, a Stalin as
human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing
portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive and unforgiving.
"From the Hardcover edition.
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