The definitive life of Stalin

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. [pounds sterling]25.00. 690 pages. ISBN 1-842-12726-8.

Sebag Montefiore has produced the authoritative account of Stalin, the man, his circle, his relationships and his working methods. A huge mass of material has been organised into a clear, coherent narrative, well balanced between the serious politics and the intimate detail and unsparing in its gruesome factual account of what it was like to be there. The most impressive feature is the amount and seriousness of the archive and research material he has deployed. How on earth did he get at it all? One has heard Anthony Beevor describe the difficulty of researching simple military records for his books on Stalingrad and Berlin--the escort leaving him alone, then tip-toeing back to fling the door open in the hope of finding him reading some file other than the permitted one, the obstacles placed in his way in describing anything other than perfect behaviour by Russia and Russians--and one is immensely impressed by Mr. Sebag Montefiore's persistence, charm and guile in getting at this material. The book represents an Everest of research.

What emerges? Every reader will find what he wants here. For this reviewer, the biggest theme is the results of the Marxist-Leninist disbelief in the existence of justice. To them, the whole apparatus of the law--police, advocates, dignified courts, judges in robes and all pretending not to be part of the class war--was a propaganda device dressing up the maintenance of bourgeois rule. There was, of course, a long tradition of simple administrative punishment in Old Russia, by which an officer could order a soldier to be, say, flogged to death just as a part of maintaining discipline. When they got on top, they did just the same, only more so--in spades. But it is still chilling to read a report to Stalin from the Ukraine: '... destroyed fifteen villages today ...'.

Stalin became General Secretary on Lenin's death mainly because he was not Trotsky, who had patronised too many people. Lenin had liked him and used him, for example, to defeat the Whites at Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad), but had misgivings. Stalin was bluff, good-humoured and charming in a simple, earthy peasant way. He seemed a safe choice, but the Central Committee were to have thirty years to think their safe choice over. Mr. Sebag Montefiore is illuminating on those early years, when a group of young idealists had seized the Kremlin, where they lived almost like a commune, the children playing together and Stalin signing his children's homework to show that their father had seen it (a custom that might be adopted with advantage). They were going to create heaven on earth, since there was no other heaven, and no-one should stand in their way.

Stalin had got his secondary education, five years of it, in a Georgian seminary, because is mother wanted him to be a priest. He revolted against the doctrine, and was thrown out when he was twenty, but admired the methods, especially the persistent brain-washing. He became a considerable theorist of Marxist-Leninist ideas, beginning with the 'question of nationalities', but ending with anything and everything. One notes that Stalin ruled Russia using his second, or perhaps third, language; he also spoke Mingrelian, a Georgian dialect, especially to his fellow-Georgian, Beria. That is not something a simpleton could do.

The stages in Stalin's ascent were marked by crushing opposition on the grandest scale. First, there was agriculture. The farmers had to be crushed, driven into collective or state farms and their ownership of their land ended. That took four years, continuous famine, and over a million dead in the Ukraine alone. Stalin told Churchill that this had been his hardest struggle, harder even than the Second World War. Then there was the Army to crush, wiping out the entire high command (except, fortunately, for young General Zhukov, who was away fighting the Japanese, and so was available to be the Red Army's greatest commander--and who lived to perform perhaps his greatest service, arresting Beria during a full Politburo meeting). Then there was the Party itself to be purged, and spies and saboteurs to be rooted out by sending arrest quotas to every region. One has to remember that even by 1937 the party had only been in power for twenty years, and most adult Russians could remember other ways of running things. This reviewer can just recall the newsreels of the trials of the leading Old Bolsheviks, and the incredulity of the commentators as one after another confessed to crimes they were most unlikely to have committed. Simon Sebag Montefiore explains that these were got by promising the victims that their families would be safe, the promises were not kept.

Then there was the Second World War, and the curious fact that whereas Hitler began as a competent strategist and ended as a rotten one, with Stalin it was the other way round. It remains a mystery as to why and how the Red Army kept fighting: the old Tsarist Army had given up, deserted and revolted in 1916-17 after enduring less than half what the Red Army did. Perhaps one statistic holds the secret: in 1941-42, 994,000 soldiers were condemned of whom 157,000 were shot. (The British Army is still criticised for shooting 320 men in the First World War.) Anthony Beevor got into trouble for explaining that in 1942-43, the Red Army shot about 13,000 of its own men in the single battle of Stalingrad. Human losses in Russia were so great--although unknown, because for many decades afterwards population statistics were state secrets--that it is quite possible that by 1945 the Red Army was the thinnest possible crust of good-quality fighting men, and that if Hitler had been able to hold out just a few months longer his army would have faced Central Asians, primitive and conscripted. If that were so, then Stalin pulled off the greatest bluff of his career by claiming as of right--the right of conquest--half of Europe.