In the 1930s in Soviet Russia, “there were also some natural deaths.” Beneath the seemingly anecdotal tone, almost distancing from history, lies a biography marked by a relentless indictment. Simon Sebag Montefiore, a globally recognized and award-winning expert on Russia, from the old regime to the Bolshevik revolution, presents this time a masterful chronicle, a complete and unflinching portrait of one of the darkest and bloodiest periods of the Soviet era: that led by “Comrade Stalin.” He details the “court,” the real hard core of a few “apparatchiks,” those collaborators and privileged members of the system who surrounded the “little father of the peoples.” His work primarily emphasizes the ruthless and monstrously cold functioning of the power machine. Moreover, he manages to show how its gears matched the various manifestations of the paranoid structure in place in the Georgian dictator.
He introduces his work with the tragic suicide of Nadejda, the wife of Joseph Djougashvili, presented as a precursor to the upcoming horrors of the Stalinist regime. The historian immediately places us, with an extraordinary amount of detail—the result of numerous interviews with descendants and survivors—at the heart of the apartments and offices of the Kremlin. There, officials and guards had to stop, press against the wall, and open the palms of their hands as the dictator passed by. As day follows night, he then guides us through the mazes of machinations woven in the corridors of the Politburo before naturally taking us into the underground torture chambers of Lubyanka, the infamous prison of the Ministry of the Interior and secret services.
Rest assured, the reader is allowed to breathe momentarily, enjoying scenes hard to imagine in such a macabre setting: soirees at the Georgian’s dacha just outside Moscow, where ministers, people’s commissars, and other members of his close guard dine, sing, and dance, feigning carefree attitudes. We then seamlessly discover a father who is affectionate and attentive to his children’s education, a relentless seducer who does not hesitate to woo the young wife of one of his accomplices, almost a genial and weary patriarch as Gontcharov might describe in one of his endless novels.
The Stalinist purges are recounted with a detail that could border on the morbid if it were not so essential for historians, political scientists, and even psychiatrists: dekulakization, the great Moscow trials, terrors that emptied the military leadership of some of its best officers, mass deportations of Caucasian populations accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the “Great Patriotic War,” elimination of the “white blouses,” a whole cohort of doctors, including Stalin’s personal physician, obsessed with his health. Elements that plentifully feed the feeling of living in a deleterious, arbitrary, and uncertain atmosphere that affects both the common man and the potentate. No one was safe from the tyrant’s suspicions, not even his own family—except for his children.
It is not the least of Montefiore’s achievements in this voluminous and fascinating study to immerse us in this unhealthy and bleak climate. Which sheds light, despite what the proponents of “sovereign democracy” and the “verticality of power” in contemporary Russia might say, on the mental remnants inherited from this terrible Soviet era, responsible for several million deaths. Generally, when reading the biography of a respectable and dignified man, the final moments of his agony may be felt with a kind of inner sadness by the reader immersed in the narrative. Stalin’s final moments, however, only evoke a sense of immense relief. And that says something about the literary power of this work.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,” Editions des Syrtes, 2007, 793 pages, 29.50 euros. Buy online.
