Significant insight into the madness that was Bolshevism. ( )

This book presents in great detail, the rise and fall of the various powerful personalities, their wives and lovers. The appalling cruelty of the Terror and the war are revealed in the rise and fall of the people around Stalin. What made the most telling impression was the staggering numbers of people who were killed, or who starved to death in the famines and executions of the Terror. The bizarre personal lives of the leaders of the Secret Police such as Lavrenti Beria and Yehzov are revealed in detail. The book's focus is limited and because of that, one will be disappointed if looking for an historical or strategic account of the the war and other major events, however this lengthy book is a fascinating account of an era in history when 20,000,000 people list their lives and another 28,000,000 were dislocated to the gulags. While almost any history will outline the horrific losses of the holocaust, far fewer pay attention to staggering losses of Stalin's rule. ( )

To a reader unfamiliar with Soviet history should read Lenin by Robert Service and Young Stalin by Montefiore before reading Stalin... ( )

Not read yet.

It is a massive book, both in scope and in terms of the sheer size of the book (even in paperback, it's well over 700 pages long). There is no question but that Sebag-Montefiore has done his research, especially in terms of the primary sources he employs, the places he visited, and the people interviewed. But the lack of footnotes in the paperback edition is still jarring. They are omitted for reasons of space; but with so much new material used, so many quotes cited, and just for general historical accuracy, I don't find it good enough. All the references are apparently available somewhere online, but neither I nor Google can seem to find them. A glossary would also have been heplful - for example, he doesn't explain the term Vozhd until about the twentieth or so time he uses it.

It's probably best not to approach this book as either a primer on Russian history (Sebag-Montefiore tends to use the history of the Soviet Union to '53 as merely a backdrop for the goings on in Stalin's court) or as a life of Stalin. As a (gossipy) history of the incestuous gaggle which surrounded Stalin, it is extremely good; as a record of the banality of their evil, it is even better.

The one thing that truly irks me about the whole thing (yes, even more than the footnotes) is his style. It's very erudite and polished, but it is also very journalistic, with a very breathless quality to the first 150 pages or so. He frequently refers to Yagoda simply as Blackberry, or Molotov as Iron-Arse. He's also inclined to do things like comparing articles in Pravda to Hello or OK! magazine, or the rooms where the magnates gathered at the show trials of the 1930s to modern celebrity green rooms, backstage at TV shows. They're colourful and graphic, yes, but I think they're a little bit too much of a... studied anachronism, maybe? And I do think they will help to date the work enormously. There are places where I think he could have used an editor to show him the joys of semicolons, and to cut down on extraneous information (do we really need to know twice in twenty pages that Yuri Zhdanov's primary degree was in chemistry, with a postgraduate degree in philosophy?) and the purple prose (the immediate pre-WWII period being described as 'an oasis of consolation in a darkening sky'?)

It's a very good book, but I think it had the potential to be an excellent one. Recommended, but a qualified recommendation. ( )