Stalin - The Court of the Red Tsar

Stalin - The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Phoenix, HK$165

This sharply focused account of life within shooting distance of one of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century makes for harrowing reading. New archival material from Moscow and interviews with the surviving children of Josef Stalin's confidants and counsellors lead British journalist Simon Sebag Montefiore to unmask one of history's enigmas. Stalin - The Court of the Red Tsar isn't directly concerned with policies, nor the already well-documented slaughter of tens of millions of people, but rather how Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century, managed to justify what he did and get away with it for so long. 'This 'social system based on bloodletting' justified murder now with the prospect of happiness later.' But the dictator was no psychopath. Murder was expedient. 'No man, no problem,' he once said. Sebag Montefiore makes clear that although 'Stalin was the mastermind ... he was far from alone'. He puts faces on the accomplices, among them foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, the ruthlessly depraved Nikolai Yezhov and secret police chief Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, who fed Stalin's belief that 'the solution to every human problem was death'.