Hard to put down this history of the Stalin years. This book is well written and very interesting. ( )

At first I had some qualms with this book, but after the first 100 pages or so, I became engrossed that I dismissed my earlier criticisms as nitpicking and embraced this wonderful book. Sebag Montefiore has a way with words so that even if the narrative gets bogged down in a dizzying sea of convoluted intrigue and overlarge cast, it still keeps me avidly turning the page. His wicked sense of humor and often bombastic diction had me laughing out loud many times -- an amazing accomplishment considering how much I loathed basically every adult character in Stalin's "court."

If you are even remotely interested in Stalin, dictators or paranoid narcissist mass murderers in general, this is the book for you. ( )

A lot that's all-too-familiar and tragic, though there's quite a bit of new material (equally tragic) in this account of Stalin's rule over Russia from 1924 to 1953, picking up where "Young Stalin" left off. You read this, and shudder. Definitely recommended, though you might need a strong stomach. ( )

Montefiore (The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin) is more interested in life at the top than at the bottom, so he includes hundreds of pages on Stalin's purges of top Communists, while devoting much less space to the forced collectivization of Soviet peasants that led to millions of deaths. In lively prose, he intersperses his mammoth account of Stalin's often-deadly political decisions with the personal lives of the Soviet dictator and those around him. As a result, the reader learns about sexual peccadilloes of the top Communists: Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, for one, "craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players." Stalin's own escapades after the death of his wife are also noted. There's also much detail about the food at parties and other meetings of Stalin's henchmen. The effect is paradoxical: Stalin and his cronies are humanized at the same time as their cruel misdeeds are recounted. Montefiore offers little help in answering some of the unsettled questions surrounding Stalin: how involved was he in the 1934 murder of rising official Sergei Kirov, for example. He also seems to leave open the question of Stalin's paranoia: he argues that the Georgian-born ruler was a charming man who used his people skills to get whatever he wanted. Montefiore mainly skirts the paranoia issue, noting that only after WWII, when Stalin launched his anti-Semitic campaigns, did he "become a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite." There are many Stalin biographies out there, but this fascinating work distinguishes itself by its extensive use of fresh archival material and its focus on Stalin's ever-changing coterie. Maps and 24 pages of photos not seen by PW.

Well written, lots of intense stuff of course.

Amongst it all, this book kinda implies that the almost-invited-in-by-Stalin German attack in WWII was a collollary of the terror, and that the terror was a collollary of Stalin's wife (presumably) killing herself. He was, in fact, bonkers. ( )