Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
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Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimesâ€“as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulagâ€“has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century. But though the facts of Stalinâ€™s reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundationâ€“human, psychological and physicalâ€“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 Ã©lan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalinâ€™s court from the time of his acclamation as â€œleaderâ€ in 1929, five years after Leninâ€™s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of seventy-three. Through the lens of personalityâ€“Stalinâ€™s as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among themâ€“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: Stalinâ€™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 Leninâ€™s dictum, â€œA revolution without firing squads is meaninglessâ€). We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalinâ€™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 Stalinâ€™s court. And he traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalinâ€™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 Stalinâ€™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 Stalinâ€™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.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2004-04-13
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781400042302

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2004-04-13
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781400042302

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

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