Rating: 
Summary: Don't mistake this for a biography
Review: The title says it all. This is about Stalin's relationships with his peers (although they became more like scared children than peers as the years went by). Taken as such, this is fascinating reading. Montefiore picks one event that he feels is the turning point in Stalin's life, his wife's suicide, and runs with it, showing that from that point Stalin placed more emphasis on ideology and party/personal loyalty than on family, or even basic human decency. Those that weren't strong enough to enforce his will suffered the consequences. And of course some of those that did his dirty work paid the price as well, since somebody had to take the blame for the excesses. I would argue that Montefiore makes too much of Nadya's suicide as the major cause of Stalin's excesses, since the extermination of the kulaks was already occurring at that point. In fact, Montefiore lets us know that the wives of the magnates were all for much of the Party's decisions. It is tough to argue that Nadya would have been a moderating force of some kind. It would be just as easy to argue that, had she lived, Nadya could have faced a similar fate to that which many of the other wives faced. What Montefiore therefore doesn't do is answer the question of "Why?". Why does Stalin begin the Terror? Why does Stalin eliminate the Old Bolsheviks? Why does Stalin go after the families of his peers? And why do his peers not band together and eliminate Stalin?
What Montefiore does do right is show us the staggering scale of Stalin's crimes on a more understandable scale. To paraphrase Stalin, one death is a tragedy, one million dead is a statistic. Reading about quotas to arrest and kill 7800 people is sobering. And reading about the bragging of those assigned the tasks of the arrests when they exceeded their targets by several thousand makes one wonder about the complicity of others and why a people would not revolt against such barbarity.
I think ultimately what makes this book worthwhile is the look at those that worked with Stalin. In some strange way I found myself feeling sorry for people like Molotov and Beria. Montefiore makes the inhuman seem human and therefore we more easily visualize Stalin since we are looking through their eyes. This view of Stalin will stay with me for a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: The Most Compelling Book I've Ever Read About Stalin
Review: "Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar" is simply the most compelling book I've ever read about Stalin, and I've read a few (from Martin Amis to Solzhenitsyn to Robert Tucker to Volkogonov.) Montefiore has the skills of a novelist with narrative drive, smooth prose, and psychological portraiture. He also has ransacked a treasure-trove of freshly available documents like personal correspondence, newly published memoirs, and in-depth interviews with family members of the Soviet elite. The result is the most gripping picture yet of this time and place in world history.Interestingly enough, the Soviet leaders were like a small town where everyone knew and lived in close proximitity with each other. Add to this the murderous habits of the Bolsheviks and you get something which looks amazingly like "The Sopranos": family men who were also monsters. (I guess David Chase just has great instincts for this kind of material.) There's also a resemblance to "I, Claudius" in the mixture of power, family banality, and horror. For example secret police chief Beria was a loving husband, father and grandfather who also personally tortured, raped, and killed his victims. (Human bones were recently found in the basement of his old mansion, according to Montefiore.) The author also has a sure grasp on the moral and intellectual issues raised by Stalin's life. He says that the Communists were a fanatical sect and compares them to the "Islamo-fascists" that we face today. He also gives an amazingly rounded portrait of the human side of the dictator and the people around him. We learn about Stalin's mistresses; that the secret policeman Yezov's flighty, doomed wife slept with the great writer Isaac Babel; that Stalin ordered the destruction of his wife Nadya's entire family (including one woman who had an affair with him.) This is an absolutely essential book which you must purchase immediately.
Rating:
Summary: Inside Stalin
Review: Any historical figure who has earned the suffix of an '-ism' has, most likely, long been shrouded in myth. Sebag Montefiore has dug deep into the archives and found an astounding amount of new material to chart the inner circle of Stalin's court, bringing the man out of the shadows and into the third dimension. You may well wish he'd stayed in the dark. STALIN makes for fascinating and often brutal reading. Most extraordinary is just what a closed and cosy court Stalin reigned over. Sebag Montefiore manages to recreate the lethal and intimate atmosphere that all who chose to be close to him were forced to endure. Most interesting are the early days, long before corruption had penetrated the Politburo. Here, the author uncovers the highest ranking officials taking trams to work, and Stalin's own wife begging 50 roubles off her husband for children's clothes. The descent soon begins, and Sebag Montefiore follows its course in excerpts from Stalin's own archives and interviews too numerous to mention. Every now and then, there is the tiniest slip. In one sentence, an official is described as both bald and red headed, but that is pure pedantry. It's hard to imagine a more fascinating biography hitting the shelves this year. Be warned, it's a 600 page hernia of a tome, but take comfort in the author's ability to keep the pages turning.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating account of Stalin's inner circle
Review: As he did in "Prince of Princes," his masterful biography of Prince Potemkin, Simon Sebag Montefiore has produced a first-rate account of one of the most important figures in Russian history. Written with rare style and keen psychological insight, filled with fascinating new material from previously closed Russian archives, Montefiore's "Stalin" provides readers with an engrossing account of Koba and his inner circle.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating account of Stalin's inner circle
Review: As he did in "Prince of Princes," his masterful biography of Prince Potemkin, Simon Sebag Montefiore has produced a first-rate account of one of the most important figures in Russian history. Written with rare style and keen psychological insight, filled with fascinating new material from previously closed Russian archives, Montefiore's "Stalin" provides readers with an engrossing account of Koba and his inner circle.
Rating:
Summary: Horrifyingly Fascinating Account of Stalin
Review: I must admit that I feel a bit of guilt for the compulsive manner in which I read this highly personal account of life in the court of Stalin. This well-told story is horrible, but fascinating. Montefiore makes no effort to dissect the big geopolitical issues of the Stalin era, except to use them as a backdrop to the backstabbing, denunciations, groveling, and horror in which the senior leadership of the Soviet Union operated from the early 30s until the early 50s. Using in-depth interviews and newly-available archival information, including much of the correspondence between and among the senior leadership, Montefiore fleshes out what was going on under the surface, in particular the complex love-hate (mostly hate) relationship of Stalin to his court. It's a wonderful account of a country run by leaders who viewed their role more as mafiosi than as leaders of a legitimate government. In a real sense, they were gangsters and that's the way they ran the country--including the way Stalin required the leadership to all participate in the Great Terror (he wanted all them to have blood on their hands and thus share in the collective guilt). The author's behind-the-scenes view of the Great Terror is the centerpiece of the book. His portraits of Yeshov and Beria, the two most malignant monsters after Stalin, will now be etched into my memory. But in the end, the book is a portrait of Stalin, a man who could turn on the charm, perform an act of kindness for an old comrade, then in the next moment sign the death warrants of hundreds of innocent victims. I disagree with other reviewers who criticize the author for treating Stalin too kindly. There's no question where Montefiore stands: he views Stalin was a monster, and Stalin's occasional human touches makes him even more so. I've had long-term interest in 20th century Russian history, particularly trying to understand how a country could find itself in the hands of the personification of evil. This book helps answer the question. A final point. Montefiore is an excellent story teller. I don't pretend to be in position to judge all his conclusions, but they have the ring of truth to them, and the author is good about telling the reader when he's departed from evidence into speculation. I recommend this book. I only wish that in reading it, I lacked the guilty fascination that comes from watching an entire nation turned into a train wreck by a single evil man.
Rating: 
Summary: Could have been better...
Review: I saw the author interviewed on C-Span Booknotes,and he was very knowledgeable. The stories he told were fascinating, and I couldn't wait to get this book. I was a little disappointed when I started reading because much of it is based on personal letters that show little of what Stalin was like. I found his way of writing a book to be hard reading. It's not a clear and concise storyline in the traditional sense. It seems scattered.
Also, I'm not particularly interested in if little joe had a wonderful time in the park. The author throws Russian names, after Russian names at you to the point where it gets tiresome, and hard to follow. I was hoping this would be a much better read.
Rating:
Summary: Family-values & the psychosis of a dictatorship
Review: I was seven years old when Stalin died. His mythic spirit hovered over my childhood in the 50s revolts in Hungary, my parents subdued fear of Senator McCarthy's pogrom & jingoism and the nuns' ceaseless telling of how horrible life would be under Communism & its denial of God. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's angels cleaned his blackboards on national television, a program we watched "religiously," since it added to our misunderstandings of the Iron Curtain. And I have been ever since fascinated by the lives and minds of history's beasts. This strange book reveals a chummy and quaint family of violent & explosive personalities. It is the story of a society that some may find strangely resonant with today. Bolshevism promised a new dynamism for a new world. Lives passed back and forth across tables and mattresses, in and out of dachas, but without any of the half-baked tenderness of the heydays of hippiedom. Any such comparison falls flat when the center of this dynamism always refers back to Stalin. Montefiore makes it quite clear early on that this is no family-values story. All the love letters, children and garden-tending cannot cover up the gut-wrenching tyranny that allowed Stalin to arrest & do away with families of his co-conspirators and then use that sway to eventually do away with his henchmen. Montefiore gives it to us straight: this was a murderous gang of thugs, a kleptocracy of the hell-bound, a celebration of mean-spiritedness & connivance. By the time I got to the last pages & my memories of my life as a "Cold War" child finally caught up with circumstances in the book, I could relax. When Stalin's death came to the pages, I realized that I had survived more than just reading the book. I had survived that time myself. Somewhere between my seventh year and today, everything that the author describes has touched my life, one way or the other. I was reminded of watching TV coverage of German citizens on both sides of the Berlin Wall taking history into their own hands. I could think only of lives cut short and brutalized, lives that weren't long enough to see the end of what Lenin and certainly Stalin had begun. This is a well-written, seriously documented book. The author has taken great pains to collect & organize this extremely important piece of history, far too late in the telling. It's more than a shopping list of the dead, the show trials, the shootings, hangings & pre-arranged automobile accidents. It's the story of one life that cut short 20 million others. It's a story that should be known today, when once again, as Montefiore notes, "'terrorism' simply signified 'any doubt about the policies or character of'" the Great Leader himself.
Rating: 
Summary: Factual Errors in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Review: I will not go into any details in this first review, but one very important oversight by the editors was the overlooking of the errors in factual information such as dates, names, etc. If a teacher were to use this book in a history class the students would be subject to a wealth of misinformation.
Rating:
Summary: Monster man, monster book...
Review: If it is possible for a book to be fascinating and tedious at the same time, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is just that. This is not your typical Stalin biography. There is almost nothing about his childhood and his time in the seminary, and just a basic outline of his early days in the party. Instead, the bulk of this book focuses on 1929 to Stalin's death in 1953.
Montefiore sets out to solve the puzzle that is Joseph Stalin-the most complex and contradictory of men. At times, he showed a tender side. He was good with children, adored daughter Svetlana, spent hours in his garden and fed the birds daily. He loved to sing and was partial to the hymns of his youth. When a minister told Stalin that he had severed ties with his parents because his father was a priest, Stalin sent financial assistance to the family anonymously. The Soviets hated any monarchy, but Stalin enjoyed the trappings of Imperial Russia and likened himself to a tsar. He revered Ivan the Terrible, who became his role model. But words cannot describe the atrocities committed in Stalin's name, and monster is too good a word for him. His secret police (the NKVD) ruled through brutal, unrestrained terror. Anyone suspected of being an "enemy of the people" was jailed, interrogated, tortured, deported, exiled and/or killed. If one member a family was guilty, the entire family became victims. He ordered the arrest and murder of friends, rivals, enemies and even his family. His paranoia was so great that his philosophy was it is better to kill innocent victims than to let one guilty person go free. Even his policies caused millions of people to perish. While it is difficult to find any definitive numbers on how many Russian deaths are attributed to Stalin, the guesses range from 20 to 50 million people.
This book is not just about Stalin, but also the many ministers, advisors, magnates and extended family that orbited around him. Early on, they were one big happy, Soviet family. They lived together in the Kremlin, worked together, played together, and vacationed together in the Crimea. But during the 1930's, Stalin started the Terror, and many fell victim to his wrath. Some lived to tell and were eventually given other jobs. Others weren't so lucky. Some of the names are familiar (Molotov and Khrushchev), but most are not. Sometimes it's difficult to keep them all straight.
One aspect that brings new life to Stalin's story is that Montefiore had access to newly opened Soviet files. Some of the stories told here have never been told before. He also interviewed a number of children and grandchildren of Stalin's various ministers. They are also able to give a more personal view of Stalin. But one thing that was tedious about this book was the Russian names. Many Russians were known by their first name, patronymic, last name, "nom de revolution," maiden name, and/or familiar name. Joseph Stalin was also Joseph Vissarionovich, Joseph Djugashvili, Koba and Soso. He's easy enough to keep straight, but when Montefiore uses primarily last names, it throws the reader off when he all of a sudden switches to first or familiar names with the other ministers. One thing that was also disconcerting is that many of those interviewed by Montefiore still believe that Joseph Stalin was a great man. I couldn't help thinking while reading this book that Montefiore agrees with them. Still, despite some flaws, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a monumental work and a worthy read for any Russophile.
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