Stalin

The Court of the Red Tsar

By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Narrated by: Jonathan Aris

Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes - as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag - has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the 20th century. But though the facts of Stalin’s reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundation - human, psychological and physical - that supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him.

In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of 73. Through the lens of personality - Stalin’s as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them - the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalin’s favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenin’s dictum “a revolution without firing squads is meaningless”). We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia, and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalin’s inner court, and we see how the dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the awful efficiency of his killing machine.

With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalin’s court. And he traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s gives way to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II (there has never been as acute an account of Stalin’s meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the rest of his country.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin’s dictatorship and, as well, a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive, and unforgiving.

©2007 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Terrific... Montefiore’s portrait of Stalin and his circle is a deeply researched and wonderfully readable accomplishment - scholarship as a kind of savage gossip...its sensationalism redeemed by Montefiore’s deep grounding in the facts.” (Lance Murrow, Time)

“Montefiore’s superb book offers a closer look at this personal side of Stalin and his top collaborators. Indeed, no Western writer has got as close. He trawled through newly opened (and often subsequently closed) Soviet archives, which brought some astonishing material to the surface... [A] dark and excellent book.” (Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books)

“Mr. Montefiore draws upon new archival material, unpublished memoirs and interviews with survivors of that era (including many children of Stalin’s associates and underlings) to create a harrowing portrait of life in the dictator’s inner circle. In doing so, he gives us an intimate look at Stalin himself and the culture of sadism, ruthlessness and dread that flourished around him, fueling a murderous regime that would leave tens of millions of people dead.” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)

chapter 40?

loved it but I believe the last part of part 2 which is chapter 40 is unavailable. it is listed as 0000 seconds long and skips to next part. what gives?

Excellent narrator !

Narrator is excellent! This books kept my interest from start to finish. Great for history buffs and new comers alike!

Interesting book but not a interesting man.

I have read Lenin's biography and between the two Lenin is a more interesting character. Stalin was just plain evil, but I did enjoy learning the history.

Chilling, a horror story of the Last Tsar.

Loved it, a story of loss, intrigue, betrayal and utter horror. The dry wit of the writing and fantastic delivery by the narrator made this is a chilling late night listen.

Great book about horrible historical events.

The research that went into this book was very impressive. At times I had to take a break from the audible book and the physical book which I was reading simultaneously because it was soul crushing to fathom the wanton torture and death that was heaped upon the people of the Soviet block countries for so long. I did have a beef with the audible version however, I found the Russian characters voiced with British accents difficult to listen to, almost creating the impression of a parody which this story certainly is not.

One of the best biographies I have read

This book details both the triumphs and predations of Stalin's reign, how he made decisions, and how those around him lived. It's an instructive, horrowing, mystifying, and deeply moving book at how Tyranny affects people's lives and why many choose to not only with dictatorship, but sometimes champion it. Please read this along with Montefiore other book on Stalin, Young Stalin. Both make excellent biographies on Stalin's life.

BLOOD. BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD

I spent the entire summer of 2020 off and on listening to this book. I wanted to understand the motivation, the psychic disposition, the compulsions of the tyrannical personality.

What I got from Montefiore were the results, the product, of a despotic mind. I did not find the answer to WHY. We see very little of Stalin‘s formative years, the bending of the boy to behavior that boggles comprehension.

We do see way too much of the endless, ruthless, seemingly unjustifiable murderers of entire populations ordered by Stalin and his cadre of brutal thugs

Perhaps I’m dumb or ask too much, but I’ve been a lover of biographies for 70+ years and learned a great deal about human motivation from living with a person — as Doris Kearns Goodwin Is fond of saying — in the pages of books. Mr Montefiore’s research is more than impressive but my overall take of the book lies in my headline

Great and engaging

The book doesn’t shy from talking about atrocities, crimes and torture. However, the author did a great job of making the whole story very engaging. Narrator is top notch.

Outstanding and Worth The Listen

While I can remember this book being listed as a Best Seller on the NY Times Book list years ago, I could never convince myself to purchase the book. However when Audible made the book available, I could not resist purchasing it and I am glad that I did. IMHO opinion this is probably the best book that I ever listened to that focused on the lives of the political figures who served in Stalinist Russia. Sebag Montifiore does an incredible job painting a portrait of each of them (Rykov, Bukharin, Zinoview, Kameniev, Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Molotov, Manlenkov, Yagoda, Yashev and Beria) to name a few) and their interaction with Stalin and each other as they all tried to survive in Stalinist Russia. Although I am an avid history student, the author did a great job in his description of the period and made me feel as if I were a bystander to the intrigue and purges. I also believe that the author did a great job painting a picture of Stalin's three children- from his daughter who defected to the West, to this son Yakov, who died as a POW in a German camp. The narration was excellent. It was worth waiting for the audio.

Best narrator!

Fantastic narrator. A well told story though sometimes felt like a string of personal anecdotes.