Stalin

Strip away the uniforms and the parades, and Montefiore's Stalin is oddly domestic. He lived simply, wore plain tunics, disliked ostentation. He loved his garden at the dacha, pruning roses and lemon trees with real pleasure. He sang Georgian songs in a fine voice, wept at certain operas, kept a personal library of tens of thousands of books, many annotated in his own hand. He could be, by the accounts of those who survived him, genuinely charming — a listener, a joker, a giver of nicknames, a man who fussed over the education of his colleagues' children.

The same man governed with a pencil. He signed and countersigned execution quotas by region, sometimes raising the numbers the local officials had proposed. On a single day in December 1938 he and Molotov approved lists containing thousands of names. He read them not as statistics but as a task, working late, methodical, unhurried, occasionally scrawling a word of comment beside a name. Montefiore's point is that the intimacy and the killing were not two separate Stalins. They were one, and the reader is never allowed to hold them apart.

The heart of the book is the dinner table. At his dachas near Moscow, in the Crimea, in his native Georgia, Stalin held long nocturnal feasts that Montefiore reconstructs in vivid detail. The wine flowed — Georgian reds he chose himself — the food was abundant, the toasts endless. He would force his guests to drink until they lost control, then watch what they said. Drunkenness was a form of interrogation. The men laughed and sang and knew they were being studied, and the meals dragged on until dawn because no one could leave before the host.

These evenings were governed by a cruel comedy. Stalin liked practical jokes: a tomato placed on a chair, watches secretly reset, Khrushchev made to dance the gopak like a peasant. The most powerful men in the Soviet Union performed for their host like courtiers before a Renaissance prince, because the alternative to amusing him was unthinkable. Montefiore captures the peculiar atmosphere — jovial, warm, and lethal all at once — better than any statistic could. Laughter and dread were not opposites in that room; they were the same reflex.

Step back from the individual scenes and Montefiore's portrait becomes an argument about power itself. When a state is organized entirely around one man's suspicions, fear becomes the only currency anyone can trade in. Talent, loyalty, past service — none of it protects you, because the ruler's mood is the only law. Everyone lies upward, telling Stalin what he wants to hear, until the man at the center is surrounded by flattery and can no longer tell truth from performance. The system he built to make himself safe made him ever more isolated and ever more afraid.

That dynamic is what makes the terror self-perpetuating rather than a phase. Each purge removed the people who knew too much and installed newer, more frightened, more compliant successors — sycophants replacing sycophants, in Montefiore's phrase, like Hitler's shrinking circle. The machinery could not stop, because stopping would have implied the earlier killings were mistakes, and the tyrant who admits a mistake invites his own. So the appetite grew even as the country needed rebuilding, even after the vast sacrifices of the war had already emptied so many households.

He did not finish the Doctors' Plot. On the sofa at Kuntsevo, his face darkening, the man who had decided the fate of millions could not summon a doctor of his own, because the people who might have saved him had been schooled for thirty years never to move without his word. Beria, it is said, cursed him and then praised him as his breathing steadied, hedging his bets even at the deathbed. Stalin died on 5 March 1953, and the court exhaled, and immediately began maneuvering to survive one another.