Crimes of the century.(Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar)(Book Review)

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf, 816 pp., $30)

COMMUNISM, it is now generally acknowledged, was a human calamity of a kind and on a scale never previously known. As a matter of ideology, all means were justified in pursuit of Communist ends, and this granted a license for criminality devoid of moral restraints. What might have been an age of unmatched progress in the greater part of the globe was made instead to bear the mark of the beast.

This was the work of a very few men, and principal among them was Josef Stalin. Murderous autocrats are nothing new in history, but from the mid Twenties until his death in 1953, Stalin aimed for much more: the complete reordering of his own country, and the mobilization of the Communist movement against all who stood in his way internationally. Through a combination of unchecked power and personal strength of will, he was able to twist reality in pursuit of an inhuman and terrifying fantasy about mankind.

Historians have by now soberly taken the measure of Stalin's crimes, the show trials, the concentration camps of Gulag, the unprovoked aggressions against so many other nations, with genocide attempted several times--and all this while millions of deluded people everywhere were proclaiming that mankind was crossing the doorstep into utopia.

British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has set himself the task of unraveling the enigma of Stalin's character. With easy mastery, he has assembled a mass of material from published and unpublished sources, using archives newly available in Russia, and interviewing children and grandchildren of those who once came into Stalin's orbit. Vividly, with many telling anecdotes, he depicts Stalin and the myriad interactions of the courtiers and secret policemen who carried out his every order and whim. This stimulating and imaginative book illuminates how this small pockmarked man with a bad arm and a strange pigeon-toed gait and chronic tonsillitis was able to command the slavish obedience of his courtiers and so impose the nightmare of Communism.

In some respects Stalin was normal. In his way, he loved his first wife, who died young, and also his second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, who killed herself. Occasionally he consoled himself with mistresses, including a faithful maid. The sad fates of his children perplexed and even distressed him. Highly intelligent, he was an autodidact who read up thoroughly on whatever he needed to know, from ancient Greek history to the Napoleonic wars and biographies of Persian shahs. The 20,000 books in his library are scrupulously annotated. At night he watched Russian films, or American westerns from a collection that had been looted from Goebbels. Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable were actors he specially admired. Music of all sorts mattered to him; he had perfect pitch, and would often invite his favorite tenor to sing the Duke's jolly aria from Rigoletto. He shot partridges and enjoyed boating trips from one of his several palaces on the Black Sea. Sebag Montefiore stresses that charm was one of the tools Stalin perfected in the course of acquiring his sinister hold over others.

Everything changed in the Kremlin, this book argues, with the fateful decision at the end of the Twenties to collectivize agriculture. Peasants and small-holders were bound to oppose such a policy, and the secret police duly liquidated them by the millions. One way or another, Stalin's colleagues all participated in this violent extension of civil war, and from then on they knew that they were accomplices in mass murder. Once they had compromised themselves, Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Khrushchev, Beria, and all ...