Stalin

Product Description

There have been many biographies of Stalin but the court that surrounded him is untravelled ground. Simon Sebag-Montefiore acclaimed biographer of Catherine the Greats lover prime minister & general Potemkin has unearthed the vast underpinning that sustained Stalin. Not only ministers such as Molotov or secret service chiefs such as Beria but men & women whose loyalty he trusted only until the next purge. Here is the Stalin story from the inside full of revelations. How the death of Stalins wife was hushed up
- was it suicide? How the Soviet leaders & their families lived & partied inside the Kremlin walls. What happened on the first day of war with Germany in 1941. The fullest account of the meeting between Stalin Roosevelt & Churchill that settled the fate of the axis powers. & how the Great Terror in which 10 million died actually happened. Robert Service (St Antonys Oxford) former head of Russian history at the School of Slavonic Studies U. of London: Simon Sebag Montefiore has pulled it off. His book succeeds in giving us an intimate picture of daily life in the Kremlin under Stalin. The arrests & killings are not ignored; indeed Montefiore supplies extra chapters & verses on the process by which the Soviet dictator moved against his enemies real & potential. An abundance of the sources are wholly new. The result is a gripping account. Stalin was a vengeful conspirator & a murderous leader. But he was also normal in many ways. He was convivial solicitous & even flirtatious. When he wanted he could be quite a charmer. This duality has long been under-appreciated but it helps to explain why Stalin was admired as well as feared by his associates
- & indeed why his power endured. This is a fundamental theme & it is one of Montefiores that he handles it with excitement & cogency.