STALIN:
The Court of the Red Tsar.
By Simon Sebag Montefiore. Knopf. 785 pp. $30
In 1935, enchanted by Grigory Alexandrov’s cheerful films (The Jolly Fellows left him feeling as if “I’d had a month’s holiday”), Joseph Stalin decided to get personally involved in the director’s work. Alexandrov had planned to call his next film Cinderella, but the Soviet dictator proposed 12 alternative titles. His favorite, which Alexandrov wisely adopted, was Shining Path. Stalin also decided to compose new lyrics for a song in the film, producing this verse:
A joyful song is easy for the heart;
It doesn’t bore you ever;
And all the villages small and big
adore the song;
Big towns love the tune.
Since Stalin had an excellent voice—one memoir suggests that he might have become a professional singer—the old brute can be imagined singing the lyrics to himself at his Kremlin desk.
“The foundation of Stalin’s power in the Party was not fear: it was charm,” writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, a novelist and biographer. The father of the Gulag “worked hard to envelop his protégés in an irresistible embrace of folksy intimacy that convinced them there was no one he trusted more.” The charm seems to have worked on the ladies, too. Stalin told one woman, “You should teach Soviet women how to dress!” This is Stalin unzipped, as it were, and for the first time a credible human character begins to emerge.
The book’s mid-1930s vignettes provide all the more grisly a contrast to the period immediately after, when the purges get under way and we are back in the familiar territory of Stalin the psychopath. Montefiore develops this murderous phase in numbing detail, but his long interviews with descendants of Kremlin survivors and his excavations in family archives and memoirs manage to bring the horror to life. Some people seem to have been purged merely for their housing. When internal security commission chief Genrickh Yagoda fell, his successor, Nicolai Yezhov, took his apartment and Stalin assistant Vyacheslav Molotov took his dacha. The odious prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, having long envied a dacha owned by one Leonid Serebryakov, prosecuted him and took it. After Stalin’s death, Serebryakov’s relatives petitioned for the property’s return and were granted half of it. The families of prosecutor and victim have been unhappy neighbors ever since.
Montefiore’s tight focus on Stalin and his court produces some flaws of context. It is interesting to learn that when Mao Zedong visited Moscow in late 1949, on the eve of the Korean War, Molotov patronizingly quizzed him about Marxism and found that he had never read Das Kapital. But Montefiore wrongly assumes that Stalin didn’t assist when the Chinese advanced against American troops in 1950. He provided air cover, and both Moscow and Washington conspired to hush up the consequences, including a U.S. Air Force raid on the Soviet base from which the MiG-15s were flying.
On the whole, though, Montefiore has produced a remarkable and riveting work, one that reminds us of the extraordinary continuity of Soviet life, despite the bloodletting. “The families of the grandees who remained in power, Mikoyans, Khrushchevs, and Budyonnys, are regarded as a Soviet aristocracy even now,” he notes. Politics hardly seem to matter: “Nina Budyonny, still a Stalinist, is best friends with Julia Khrushcheva, who is not.”
—Martin Walker