Biography: Stalin was the most accomplished totalitarian ruler in modern history. Though he could be charming and even convivial, his name struck fear into the hearts of millions, writes Ian Thomson.
During the Great Terror of 1937-8, close to two million Russian army chiefs, priests, professors and other "enemies of the people" were shot or sent to the Gulag. Anyone who threatened the Soviet Union by so much as his thoughts - Stalin decreed - would be liquidated. With Machiavellian adroitness, he set informers against informers, families against families.
However, Stalin was not delusional. He knew very well that the "confessions" extorted from enemies were rarely true. (Indeed, he "joked" that one victim had been persuaded under torture to admit that he was the author of Eugene Onegin.) Unlike Hitler, Stalin did not see enemies everywhere; rather, he invented enemies because he needed them. Underlying his strategies of annihilation and persecution was the deeply rooted principle (inherited from Lenin) that enemies were more useful to Soviet power than friends. Indeed, Stalin's power was directly proportional to the extent of the enemy threat, whether it was Trotsky, America or the kulaks.
In this fine new biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore recreates Stalin's Kremlin court and its entourage. The book is unavoidably gruelling to read but it has valuable insights into the nature of state brutality and the aberrations of power. In the course of his research, Montefiore tracked down Stalin's son-in-law as well as over 40 surviving careerists from the leader's inner circle. From the Moscow archives, moreover, he dredged letters, telegrams and the diaries of Stalin's closest associates. Armed with this wealth of new material, Montefiore portrays the Kremlin as a red court seething with vendettas and alcohol-fuelled jealousies. With rare narrative verve, he takes us to the heart of Stalin's political sickness and the collective fanaticisim that kept the tyrant in power for 30 years.
Stalin was not the dour, walrus-moustached killer of legend, says Montefiore. On the contrary, he liked to play billiards, prune roses and sing arias from Rigoletto. Moreover, he kept a library of over 20,000 well-thumbed books, among them works by Oscar Wilde. Stalin was halfway human, and that is what makes him so frightening. The future mass murderer was born in Georgia in 1878 or 1879 (the dates are unclear), to a drunken cobbler and washerwoman. Having abandoned the priesthood, from early on Stalin cultivated the Bolshevik virtue of tverdost - hardness. ("Death solves all problems", he infamously said. "No man, no problem.") Hardness was indeed the Bolshevik way. Yet not all Stalin's henchmen were brutes. It was lack of imagination - not sadism - that made them cruel. Georgi Malenkov, Stalin's "small, flabby" Central Committee Secretary, ordered the deaths of 150,000 people. Malenkov was perfectly civil to meet, if his moral faculty was stunted.
Throughout this harrowing book, Montefiore offers sharp portraits of the social inadequates who bolstered Stalin's iron regime. Lavrenty Beria, the dictator's secret service supremo, raped women in his limousine and surely was a psychopath. Khrushchev, the rotund Ukrainian peasant, was another of Stalin's sycophantic protégés (later he became Soviet leader). These commissars happily killed to further their careers. Montefiore chronicles the trap-door disappearance of "enemies" that characterised their wretched discipleship of Stalin.
If the Great Terror was perpetrated by many willing apparatchiks, nevertheless Stalin was the dominant will. In Montefiore's analysis, Stalin's Kremlin was united less by Marxist-Leninism than by the Georgian speciality of revenge killings. Feuding and brigandry were rife in Stalin's birthplace, says the author, and the Georgian cult of blood for blood required that a clan avenge a death with another. Thus entire families were liquidated during the Great Terror for a single man's "guilt".
In spite of Stalin's rudeness, his high-handedness and callous disregard for human life, today he is admired by many Russians. Without the leader's victory at Stalingrad in 1943, they argue, Hitler would have won the war and all Europe would now be a vast German colony. It follows that Jewish culture, from the shtetls of Lithuania to the salons of Vienna, would have been obliterated entirely. There is undeniable truth to this. Yet Stalin himself became a Jew-hater of Hitlerite persuasion. In his view, Jews were a self-regarding, supranational sect inimical to the Russian race and motherland. In short, they were "cosmopolitan".
With horrific consequences, anti-Semitism was made official in the Soviet Union during the 1951-1953 Doctors' Plot. Allegedly, Russian Jewish doctors had conspired to shorten the lives of Kremlin leaders through medical negligence, and had to be "purged" (a euphemism for judicial murder which Soviet Socialism has added to the language). Soon the plot was extended to cover "traitors" and "wreckers" in every walk of life, from the MGB (the KGB of its day) to the Moscow Writers' Union. Some 10 million informants were now operating in the Soviet Union: it was not difficult for Stalin to invent enemies. Information was gathered on Jews - name, address, profession - and set down with lapidary coldness in official communiqués. Fearing guilt by association, non-Jews distanced themselves completely from Jewish acquaintances.
By now, in the early 1950s, Stalin's Politburo was tainted by deepening corruption, xenophobia and chauvinism and was often awash with vodka. As the Doctors' Plot spiralled out of control, many Russians feared a return to the mass deportations of the late 1930s. Indeed, Stalin planned to deport all Jews resident in the Soviet Union's main cities to camps in Central Asia and Siberia. But mercifully, in 1953, the dictator died. The promised show-trials never took place and the Soviet Union at last was freed of its monster. In many ways, Simon Sebag Montefiore has continued Robert Conquest's pioneering investigations into Soviet oppression, and brilliantly reveals the twisted nature of Stalin's rule. This is an impressive, if depressing, feat of scholarship.
Ian Thomson recently won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize for his biography of Primo Levi
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. By Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 693pp. £25