Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Josef Stalin liked picnics and gardening. He was an avid patron of the arts, paying particular attention to literature and cinema. He liked to vacation on the Black Sea coast with friends and lovers. And he was, by the way, a paranoiac monster responsible for the death of millions. Such is the image cast by Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin, published in 2003 and based largely upon newly available archival material and author interviews.

The book opens with a fateful dinner party in 1932, after which Stalin's second wife would (apparently) commit suicide in their Kremlin apartment; her death was announced officially as an illness, and many contend she was murdered by Stalin. Montefiore marks this night as a significant turning point in the evolution of Stalin's psychology, and thus the shape of Soviet government, a controversial assertion that seems to ignore how hotly contested the basic facts surrounding that night remain. Nevertheless, Montefiore aptly recognizes that as late as the early 1930s, Stalin had yet to emerge with the dictatorial powers he would display later in his reign. He remained constrained by the independently powerful men who surrounded him, such as Kirov, Mikoyan, Viroshilov, and Ordzhonikidze, whose own rivalries and suspicions would eventually play right into Stalin's hands. By then he was already positioning to consolidate power in his own person:

He was a self-creation. A man who invents his name, birthday, nationality, education and his entire past, in order to change history and play the role of leader, is likely to end up in a mental institution, unless he embraces, by will, luck, and skill, the movement and the moment that can overturn the natural order of things. Stalin was such a man. The movement was the Bolshevik Party; his moment, the decay of the Russian monarchy. After Stalin's death, it was fashionable to regard him as an aberration but this was to rewrite history as crudely as Stalin did himself. Stalin's success was not an accident. No one alive was more suited to the conspiratorial intrigues, theoretical runes, murderous dogmatism and inhuman sternness of Lenin's Party. It is hard to find a better synthesis between a man and a movement than the ideal marriage between Stalin and Bolshevism: he was a mirror of its virtues and its faults.

Montefiore focuses heavily upon the personal lives of Stalin and the "magnates" who surrounded him, offering detailed accounts of their vacations, their health, their social gatherings and their families. There is a tremendously incestuous aspect to their circle, with a multitude of ongoing affairs. The wives, sisters, mistresses often take center stage in the book, playing important social and political function in their own right. And as in so many authoritarian regimes, the bubble these elites inhabited was starkly distinct from the lived experience of the Soviet masses:

The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find," observed one witness, Fedor Belov, while on 21 December 1931, Stalin celebrated his birthday at Zubalovo. "I remember visiting that house with Kilment on birthdays and recall the hospitality of Joseph Vissarionovich. Songs, dances, yes, yes, dances. All were dancing as they could!" wrote the diarist Ekaterina Voroshilova, Jewish wife of the Defence Commissar, herself a revolutionary, once Yenukidze's mistress and now a fattening housewife.

Stalin demonstrated great love for the arts, but here too his megalomania shines through. He would personally scrutinize the latest novels and plays, acting as editor and co-author. He was also a one-man MPAA, personally viewing each film before it could be released for public consumption:

"For us," Lenin had said, "the most important of all the arts is cinema," the art form of the new society. Stalin personally controlled a "Soviet Hollywood" through the State Film Board, run by Boris Shumiatsky with whom he had been in exile. Stalin did not merely interfere in movies, he minutely supervised the directors and films down to their scripts: his archive reveals how he even helped write the songs. He talked about films with his entourage and passed every film before it was shown to the public, becoming his own supreme censor.

Stalin's passion would redound to the benefit of some artists, who were protected from the regime's worst excesses by Stalin's favor. Stalin "could tolerate whimsical maestros: Bulgakov and Pasternak were never arrested," though their work was suppressed.

Less fortunate were those whom Stalin deemed a threat to his consolidation of power. He eliminated many during the Great Terror of 1937-38, which Montefiore discusses not from an omniscient perspective detailing Stalin's crimes, but from within the mechanisms of power. As throughout the book, this tragic episode is told via the machinations within the regime, where the rapid rise of Lavrenti Beria to replace Terror-architect Yezhov embodies Stalin's constant cyclical efforts to clean out rivals and install a new elite obligated to him alone:

Stalin gently told Yezhov that he needed some help in running the NKVD and asked him to choose someone. Yezhov requested Malenkov but Stalin wanted to keep him in the Central Committee so someone, probably Kaganovich, proposed Beria. Stalin may have wanted a Caucasian, perhaps convinced that the cut-throat traditions of the mountains--blood feuds, vendettas and secret murders--suited the position. Beria was a natural, the only First Secretary who personally tortured his victims. The blackjack--the zhguti--and the truncheon--the dubenka--were his favorite toys. He was hated by many of the Old Bolsheviks and family members around the Leader. With the whispering, plotting, and vengeful Beria at his side, Stalin felt able to destroy his own polluted, intimate world.

Montefiore has written a strange book; it covers neither the entire chronology of Stalin's life nor the political and economic philosophy for which he is most notorious. Instead it focuses almost entirely on an unexpectedly intimate portrait of the dictator and his minions in their prime. There is a decided sense of horror at realizing that these Soviet butchers had active social lives, that some were devoted husbands, warm fathers. Montefiore's myopic approach forces needed attention on oft-overlooked aspects of elite Soviet life, but it does so at tremendous cost.

Montefiore clearly assumes the reader will have a substantial working knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War, as he covers neither with any substance. The same goes for Marxist philosophy and its peculiar Soviet iteration. There are casual mentions of collectivization and Five Year Plans, but no explanation for the causes or consequences of these programs. Montefiore enumerates in great detail the political cannibalism within the Soviet elite, but offers no substantive analysis of why Stalin operated in this way or why the elite tolerated it. Simply put, the book neglects to satisfactorily put Stalin in his place and times, an astonishing failure for a book that runs nearly 700 pages.