Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

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Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
AuthorSimon Sebag Montefiore
LanguageEnglish
SubjectHistory of the Soviet Union
GenrePopular history
PublisherPhoenix
Publication date
2003
ISBN9781842127261

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a 2003 popular history[1] book by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It focuses on the private life of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his closest political associates from the late 1920s through to his death in 1953, covering the period of collectivization, the Moscow show trials, the purges, World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.[2][3]

The research for the book privileged "letters, telegrams and diaries of [Stalin's] intimate associates" among the newly available archival material.[4] It drew in particular on Stalin's papers from the Presidential Archive in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, opened in 1999.[5] Montefiore also conducted interviews with surviving descendants of Stalin's inner circle in Rostov-on-Don, Georgia and Abkhazia "about what they saw and heard as adolescent members of the Soviet elite".[4][6]

The book discusses Stalin's "personal idiosyncrasies", including his tastes in food, footwear, architecture, "literature, music and history"), as well as his family life and mental health, and portrays him as "a man who liked to throw parties, flirt with women, play billiards, dandle babies on his knee and sing the Orthodox hymns of his youth".[4] The Stalin circle is characterised as "macho, hard-drinking, powerful, and famous across the Imperium", as a group of "voluble, violent, and colourful political showmen", "an incestuous family, a web of lifelong friendships and enduring hatreds, shared love affairs, Siberian exiles and Civil War exploits" (p. 14).

Montefiore later wrote the companion piece Young Stalin, published in 2007.

Reception[edit]

Praise[edit]

The book is judged to have succeeded in showing the importance of informal power under Stalin,[5] and in evidencing how Stalin's political circle was reinforced by intermarriage and kinship ties.[7]

It is noted for its "vivid" depiction of "the general character of elite life" in Stalin's years and for the "significant" archival research behind it.[8]

Criticism[edit]

In her own book on Stalin's political team and the overlapping social circle, the historian of the Soviet Union Sheila Fitzpatrick takes issue with Montefiore's core metaphor in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, that of "court politics", which implies a return of Tsarist autocracy in Communist disguise. She points out that the early modern Muscovite nobles, who offered some competition for the throne, controlled regional landed power bases, not specialised bureaucracy departments, whereas the ministers of the late Tsarist period were not organised to work as a team and did not socialise with the Tsar on equal terms.[9]

A reviewer for The Journal of Modern History characterises Montefiore's reconstruction of elite relations under Stalin as "a stop-start series of vignettes", lacking the necessary connection to the development of the Soviet state with its institutions. He further observes that "the way that Montefiore has presented his sources makes it almost impossible to tell what has been taken from where", which is made worse by the frequent use of unreferenced direct speech.[10]

Similar objections are made in a review for the Virginia Quarterly Review, which declares the book "a good example of how not to do historical work", and an "implausible and frustrating" attempt to combine "an ambitious academic monograph and a sensationalistic best-seller". It cites the poor organisation of material in the book, which has resulted in a "numbing accumulation of dubiously reliable trivia", and notes the low verifiability of its claims due to the remaining restrictions in access to holdings from the "notoriously arcane" Presidential Archive and other "improbably accessible" archival collections.[11]

The book has been compared unfavourably with Robert Service's 2005 biography of Stalin on account of the lower degree of caution and skepticism exercised in its treatment of rumours about Stalin, such as the allegations that he worked as an agent of the Okhrana, assassinated his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, or had always been an antisemite. Montefiore is found to differ from Service also in minimising the role of Stalin's personal choices and motivations behind the Great Purge, as he prefers to blame the Soviet leader's fanatical ideological belief and the Bolsheviks as a group for the crimes committed during Stalinism.[12]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Fitzpatrick 2015, p. 271.
  2. ^ Pipes, Richard (April 18, 2004). "The Fourth Greatest". New York Times. Retrieved April 24, 2017.
  3. ^ "Blood on the tracks". The Economist. July 26, 2003. Retrieved April 24, 2017.
  4. ^ a b c Service, Robert (19 July 2003), A despot and a flirt, The Guardian
  5. ^ a b Prosser 2004, p. 492.
  6. ^ Legvold, Robert (May–June 2004). "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953". Foreign Affairs. Retrieved April 24, 2017.
  7. ^ Alexopoulos 2008, p. 133.
  8. ^ Gill 2007, p. 723, 725.
  9. ^ Fitzpatrick 2015, p. 271–272.
  10. ^ Gill 2007, p. 724.
  11. ^ Ragsdale 2004, p. 253.
  12. ^ Alexopoulos 2008, p. 134–135.

Bibliography[edit]


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