Act 4, Scene 1 of Julius Caesar is one of the most nonchalantly shocking interchanges Shakespeare ever wrote. It presents victorious Mark Antony casually organising a purge which includes his nephew and Lepidus’s brother. I thought about that scene many times as I read, in horror, this scrupulously detailed account of Stalin’s life. The parallels are chilling. Yet Julius Caesar pre-dates Stalin’s birth by over three hundred years. The timeless truth, of course, is that absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton observed in 1887. Stalin consciously modelled himself on Ivan the Terrible.
Sebag Montefiore’s book was first published in 2003, a time when relations with Russia were relatively relaxed. British people casually visited Moscow and Petersburg to see museums and enjoy Russian culture. It meant Montefiore could interview the descendants of the huge cast of characters he writes about and crucially, he was granted access to archives which had never been open before. It is not clear whether he is fluent in Russian or whether he travels with an interpreter. Writing such a biography would, obviously, be impossible now, given the present situation. It’s fascinating, however to notice the ways in which history has repeated itself in the last 22 years.
Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, who came from humble Georgian stock, adopted the name Stalin when he became Lenin’s successor. He wanted a name which sounded similar. A heartless murdering, heartless monster soon emerged. Sebag Montefiore never leaves us in any doubt about that.
Nonetheless Stalin was a more complex, rounded character than popular history sometimes suggests, For example, he was an avid reader, had a huge library and loved writers such as Dickens. He had perfect pitch and sang so well that his friends thought he could have become a professional musician. As Sebag Montefiore comments wryly, it might have changed the course of 20th century European if Stalin had gone down that route. Moreover, capricious and unpredictable as he was, Stalin was often kind to people, He would send gifts to people whose plight caught his attention and he inspired love in his children, especially his daughter Svetlana.
Most people, however, were terrified of him – with good reason. During the purges of the late 1930s he organised quotas of “traitors” who were to be arrested and shot in the regions. These were people facing, mostly trumped up, charges of treason, and torture procedures which ensured that anyone would confess to anything. One of Stalin’s thugs casually boasted to a frightened father: “So your son wrote Eugene Onegin!”. So “popular” were the purges that the regions became competitive and requested larger quotas.
Sebag Montefiore reckons that about 20 million people were killed during Stalin’s “entire monstrous career” while 28 million were deported. Of this latter group around 18 million slaved in the gulags. There was no regard whatever for the sanctity of human life (although Stalin never stopped grieving for his wife Nadya who took her own life in 1932). In 1950 when Stalin was cosying up to the Chinese he wrote to Zhou Enlai: “The Northern Koreans could keep on fighting indefinitely because they lose nothing, except for their men.” Sebag Montefiori italicises the last four words. I’ve emboldened them as well.
Arguably Stalin’s Russian forces won the war for the allies and the scenes in which Churchill and Roosevelt meet him are not pretty. These are very famous conferences especially Teheran and Yalta but Sebag Montefiore, who has evidently studied the papers very closely, tells the story freshly. But these appalling facts were new to me: Two million German women were raped by Russian soldiers as Russian forces penetrated Germany. They even raped women who were newly liberated from Nazi camps. Stalin’s almost unbelievable comment was: “And what is so awful about his [a Soldier] having fun with a woman after such horrors?”
This is the man who also ordered the destruction of the families of Russian men who were taken captive by Germany in the early years of the war. If they allowed themselves to be captured they had surrendered to the enemy and were therefore traitors. Meanwhile, shades of Mark Antony “pricking” (marking) names on his list, Stalin had ordered the arrest of his own daughter-in-law whose three old daughter didn’t then see her mother for two years.
Sebag Montefiore is good on the luxurious lifestyle (food, drink and palaces) of Stalin and his entourage, whose fortunes went up and down like yo-yos. Beria and Molotov, for example were both in hugely powerful positions for a long time but very lucky to hang in there for as long as they did because trust was non-existent. Beria was finally “liquidated” (hideous euphemism) during the jockeying for power after Stalin’s death in 1953.
That death is interesting too. Stalin, aged 74, had not been in good health for a while but still wielded the power fiercely. Then he had a stroke, His minions failed to call a doctor for 12 hours which has long been regarded as a deliberate ploy to hasten his death. Sebag Montefiore points out, however. that Russia’s best doctors had all been arrested and were, at that point, being interrogated under torture. Stalin loathed doctors and those around him probably feared for their lives because had the sick man recovered and realised doctors had been summoned, murderous fury would have been vented. In the end he died on 05 March, 1953. Sebag Montefiore must have seen medical papers because he has an enormous amount of detail even down to Stalin’s loss of bladder control.
I am a naturally fast reader. Normally I consume two or three books a week. Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar has 750 pages and took me 16 days partly because I would often be so incredulously horror-struck at the end of a paragraph that I had to go back and read it again so make sure that I hadn’t misunderstood. This is not to say that it isn’t accessibly written because it is. And in places the prose shines. Kirov’s funeral is, for instance, described as “an extravaganza of Bolshevik sentimental kitsch.”
It’s not a comfortable read and “enjoy” certainly isn’t the right word. I am however, very glad indeed to have read this book and recommend it warmly. I have learned a huge amount. Apart from anything else it helps to explain some of the background to the present war between Russia and Ukraine.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Raven Black by Ann Cleeves
