#8 - JRL 7283
Financial Times (UK)
August 9, 2003
book review
Barbarism begins at home
Stalin is often portrayed as an isolated monster, but as Roderic Braithwaite discovers, the purges had their roots at the family dacha
By Roderic Braithwaite Roderic Braithwaite was the British Ambassador to Moscow, 1988-1992.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Dollars 20, 693 pages

Most people regard Stalin as a monster, the man who murdered millions of his fellow countrymen and women, and created a political and economic system that was crude, vicious, inefficient and ultimately unviable.

A substantial minority, especially in Russia, still regard him as a genius, the man who made the Soviet Union great, defeated Hitler and was posthumously betrayed by Gorbachev. They may admit that his achievements were bought at a great cost to his people, but they believe that the price was unavoidable and justified.

Stalin's domestic policies between the wars had a certain logic. It had long been clear that the country's peasant agriculture could not sustain a major industrial power, and that large-scale farming was the answer. Industry, too, needed to be rapidly expanded if the country was to hold its own in an era of mechanised warfare. But the methods that Stalin adopted to achieve these ends - collectivisation, famine, the Gulag, individual and mass murder - put him on a level with Hitler and the other great killers of the 20th century, and eventually brought about the collapse of the Bolshevik experiment.

His foreign and defence policies were just as costly. After Munich he concluded - reasonably enough - that France and Britain would not be reliable allies against Hitler. But the Red Army was severely weakened by confusion over military doctrine, by the need to organise the defence of the territories newly occupied in the west, by a necessary but disruptive programme of re-equipment, and above all by his massacre of the officer corps. Stalin rightly judged that his army would be in no shape to acquit itself effectively in battle until 1942.

He hoped that his pact with Hitler would enable him to postpone hostilities just long enough - a sensible though desperate policy to which he became obsessively attached.

From 1940 onwards Stalin's agencies provided him with massive and increasingly accurate intelligence of a German attack. His better generals advised discreet measures of defence. But he clung like a drowning swimmer to the illusion (shared until the last minute by British intelligence
analysts) that Hitler was bluffing. When in June 1941 the Germans did indeed attack, the Soviet Union paid an appalling blood price for that misjudgment.

Now that 50 years have passed since Stalin died, it is easier to look at him not as a monster, nor as a genius, but as a man to be measured by the normal standards of historical judgment. The literature is huge and it is growing all the time. Stalin's daughter and many of his associates, contemporaries and victims wrote invaluable memoirs. Learned men have been in and out of the dictator's archives. The Moscow rumour-mill has spawned a whole sub-literature of books about the Kremlin wives, their lovers and their children. Bookshops in Moscow and London are crammed with scholarly and less scholarly attempts to describe and explain Stalin and his regime.

One of the latest and most ambitious is Simon Sebag Montefiore's colourful baggy monster of a book about the personal relationships and habits of Stalin, his cronies, their women, their children, and even their bodyguards. This is not a conventional history. Montefiore makes it clear from the start that his aim is different: to produce a composite "biography" of Stalin and his magnates, and so restore a kind of human reality to men who have too often been depicted in one dimension only.

The picture he paints is not entirely unfamiliar. Stalin emerges from earlier accounts as a man of great intelligence, a workaholic of iron will, with a remarkable political instinct and an outstanding capacity for detail, always on the telephone, issuing and checking on orders, admonishing subordinates, a voracious reader with a gallows humour. In his social relations he could be cheerful, charming, lively. He and his colleagues, their wives and children, were in and out of one another's apartments and dachas on an almost daily basis. But he was also brutal, vengeful, eternally suspicious - and with good reason, because his paranoia was self- fulfilling. But the more extreme the policies and methods he adopted, the more he cracked down on free discussion, the more his opponents were driven to plotting against him. And so Stalin escalated the terror until the plotting ceased altogether.

The turning point was perhaps the suicide of his wife in 1932, with which Montefiore begins his tale. He puts a mass of living flesh on the bones. Pursuing his sources with remorseless energy, he has consulted the available literature, interviewed the surviving relatives, and turned up whole stacks of illuminating personal correspondence, diaries, notebooks, family photographs, even a recording of Stalin singing Georgian songs in a "sweet tenor voice". This awesome pile of material enables him to tell us what these people ate and drank, how they spent their holidays, how they quarrelled, and how they intrigued against one another with increasingly fatal results in an atmosphere of sticky intimacy, hectic conviviality and abject terror.

Montefiore drives his story forward with breathless enthusiasm, but leaves himself little time for reflection and analysis. He does suggest that these people were willing to collaborate in the destruction of colleagues, relatives and even themselves, because they shared an almost religious commitment to the Bolshevik cause. (Koestler did something similar in Darkness at Noon.) It may be part of the explanation, but it is not worked through. Montefiore's style is hectic and sometimes obscure. His accumulation of minute detail can be tiring. He sketches in the necessary political and historical background so lightly that the uninitiated may be perplexed. But this reflects his method, and it has resulted in a work of great importance. Scholars will read it for the valuable new evidence it assembles. Others will enjoy it as a fascinating page-turner and an everyday saga of extraordinary Kremlin folk.