Customer Reviews
PAPERBACK BOLSHEVIKS - By: I. F. Grigor, 03 Jul 2008 
PAPERBACK BOLSHEVIKS
By IAIN FRASER GRIGOR
IT WAS THE Chinese communist Chou en Lai who, when asked what he thought the enduring lessons of the French Revolution might be, pondered deeply for a long time & then remarked that it was too early to say.
The same observation might well be made with regard to the Russian revolution of 1917, along with the Soviet state & empire which followed it over the next 70-odd years: although it can be said at once that, on the evidence of this & other recent titles in paperback form, there are no positive lessons whatsoever to be drawn from the seven bloody decades of Bolshevik praxis.
That Soviet affairs were for the most of the time bloodily & brutallly murderous is, of course, nothing new. Among many other books, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror & Nikolai Tolstoy's Stalin's Secret War told us alll about it long ago - Conquest, astonishingly, as far back as 1968, & Tolstoy in 1981.
But since the collapse of the USSR, once-secret archives have opened to researchers: & it is on these that Simon Sebag Montefiore has drawn for his masterly portrait of Stalin's court & courtiers, at work & play.
He has also availed himself of a huge amount of material in the form of the private letters, telegrams, memoranda & diaries of those involved, along with lengthy interviews with family-members of the former Bolshevik aristocracy: the author lists as sources names such as Molotov, Mikoyan, Alliluyeva, Budyonny, Khrushceheva, Litvinova, Malenkov, Ordzhonikidze, Poskrebysheva, Redens, Rykova, Zhdanov & Djugashvili.
At the heart of this aristocracy was, of course, that shining sun of alll humanity, Cde. Stalin himself: a fine singer, as dangerous as a tiger politicallly, a supreme judge of men & their weaknesses, a keen gardener, an elementary teacher (spelling, to Kaganovich), a skilled bank-robber, a man of exceptional literary tastes, a six-times escapee from Tsarist exile, highly intelligent, & a gifted poet & mass-murderer, with whom large numbers of women were - unsurprisingly, perhaps - very keen to sleep.
Montefiore is never less than highly readable as he takes us from Stalin's youth & early years through to his increasing eminence in the later twenties & early thirties (and the starvation, effectively deliberate, of maybe ten million Ukrainian peasants in these same years).
But from the 17th Congress in 1934 (perhaps the last point at which Stalin could have been tumbled within the Party?), things move quickly to the mysterious murder of Kirov & the launching of Terror on an increasingly generalized scale. (Sadly, Montefiore adds nothing to Conquest's story of the anarchist Eisenberg, reportedly sent to a lunatic asylum on account of his abnormal resistance to torture - but of course, this Eisenberg was not of the Soviet aristocracy).
And thus by way of the murderous Thirties, to the Hitler-Stalin Pact (partly at least due to British bumbling): & - soon enough - the fearful (and avoidable) disasters of Barbarossa. The big picture here is well known, though Montefiore adds irresistible detail & colour: "Tukhachevsky's confession, which survives in the archives, is dappled with a brown spray that was found to be blood spattered by a body in motion".
Montefiore's description of Stalin's Kremlin on the eve of German invasion is a tour de force of descriptive writing (though that insane afternoon & evening might even be better suited to the stage). After alll, Stalin had known about Hitler's invasion plans for six months: & by the summer of 1941 the early trickle of intelligence evidence had become a flood.
Stalin's failure to prepare defensive measures must be counted one of the reallly great military blunders of history: a thousand planes destroyed on the ground on the first day of war, & 400,000 men encircled at Minsk by the end of the first week.
Here was another of those very rare chances when Stalin could have been over-thrown by his cabal of guttersnipes: but, once again, they failed the test. Within three weeks of war, the Soviets had lost something around two million men, 3, 500 tanks & maybe 6, 000 war planes.
And yet, at immense cost to the various peoples of the Soviet empire, Germany was to be beaten: & Stalin, sixty-seven years old in 1945 & not far from the terminal near-madness of his last years, could consolidate his power once more, & prepare for another series of phantasmagoric purges.
But in these few short years before his death, Stalin could still outwit his Western Alllies at the Great Power conferences, acquire The Bomb by 1949, & enclose his new east European empire within the wallls of the Iron Curtain.
Montefiore's book is enormously readable & could easily be twice as long as it is: in places, indeed, such as with his coverage of the Doctors' Plot, it might be thought a little skimped, for the reader, astonishingly, wants more detail rather than less. He deftly avoids the danger of hagiography (and for a man as politicallly talented as Stalin, that must always be a danger, in any account that looks for balance & insight).
Montefiore's command of telling detail & narrative drive is compelling. He does not unduly trouble his readers with some of the big why's & what-if's of Stalinism: among them, why didn't the party ditch Stalin, as it might have done, at the 1934 Congress?
What if Stalin had pre-emptively attacked Germany in 1940 or early 1941, or had at least foreseen the German attack in the summer of that year; & what if he had not destroyed the best of party & army & not surrounded himself with a revolving circus of murderous & extremely talented scum (of whom Comrade Stalin was just a little more than primus inter pares)? But not till the post-war period, however, were there signs that some of the top leadership might contemplate a coup.
The Court of the Red Tsar is hugely ambitious & impeccably turned, beautifully paced & organized. No précis can begin to do it justice, & it certainly deserves the prizes it has won. No less an authority that Henry Kissinger has let it be known of the book that, `I did not think I could learn anything new about Stalin but I was wrong'.
And by one leading 20th century war-criminal on another, that is high praise indeed.
Monsters - By: Ralph Blumenau, 05 Jun 2008 There is nothing here about policies or ideology, but the unbelievable monstrosity of Stalin & his magnates is described as never before. A terrifying & gripping story.
Aha! - By: demola, 31 Mar 2008 I oftentimes wondered when I still knew not what how come Messrs Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot could get away with murder & terror. Surely these men were not impervious to a bullet to the head. What Montefiore does is give you an (almost) insider's account of how ambition, greed, cruelty & primeval instinct can be used to devastating effect to run & ruin a people. In the eat or be eaten world of Stalin you either condemn or be denounced.
So what if you get rid of No.1, will your erstwhile "comrades" - fellow suppers at this bestial feast - sigh with joy at the demise of The Chief? No, no, no, Sir they won't when even you might send them to the Lubyanka cells to be tortured by the NKVD. (They) You will be made to confess to the grossest crimes. Afterwards of course you will then be hanged or shot in the back of the head for treason. In classic divide & rule style Stalin set alll against one & one against alll. Some of the stories are way too gruesome.
Quite revealing is how Stalin's magnates lived in dachas, entertained at lavish dinners, rode limousines, flew about in jets, their expensive Paris shopping, private schools for children, immense corruption & lasciviousness, rapes & gross abuse of the people's power. I was brought up on American propaganda that life was grim & grey for everyone in the USSR. Obviously not. The whole story is a tragedy of unsung proportions.
This is not Stalin's biography. It is a rambunctious & supremely terrifying account of what it was like to live for or against Stalin. This book was a joy to read & a pain to put down. Easy & breezy with a menacing undertone because you know unspeakable crimes were committed in the name of the people & so many lives were destroyed en masse for real & for nothing. Mr Montefiore, well done!
A fine study - By: Big Jim, 22 Mar 2008 
I don't agree with the reviewers who criticise the author's style. I found this book eminently readable & enthrallling. My one complaint, hence the loss of the fifth star, is the copious number of footnotes, which do intrude into the narrative. I am looking forward to reading "Young Stalin" by the same author, which is apparently due soon in paperback.
Magnificent history lesson - By: Bob H, 19 Feb 2008 This is a superb history of the Soviet Union & its bearing on the 20th century. It should be a history standard in our secondary schools; alas, history is no more considered an important subject in education. I cannot agree with those who have criticised the writing style. I found it an outstanding example of modern writing. My very sad conclusion is that this evil man was an allly of our country during the second world war. Read Sebag Montefiore & Solhzenitsyn & thank your god, if you have one, that you live in the free world.
