The party’s internal conflicts had already been bubbling under, prompting Lenin to forbid intra-party factions (fat chance). I believe Montefiore’s subtitle is aptly chosen much of the fascination of the book lies in its dramatic picture of an imperial régime and its distinctive cast of senior Bolsheviks – ‘magnates’ in the author’s estimation – competing for the approval of the enthroned all-powerful one, dancing to his tune (sometimes literally) and mortally fearful of antagonising him.īut that wasn’t immediate. By the time of his death in 1953 the bookish Georgian desperado had become a world statesman and paranoid dictator atop a mountain of corpses and a heavily policed population finding solace in vodka. The Red Tsar was embroiled with civil war, radical reconstruction of the Soviet economy at a terrifying human cost, a calculating and merciless struggle to eliminate virtually all of the old Bolshevik leadership who opposed him, World War 2 and the first years of the Cold War. In this epic volume he expands his approach, while still paying attention to detail, to take in a panorama of Stalin’s years as a member of a revolutionary government during years of unceasing turbulence. It is full of interesting history and very readable but the fascinatingly evil character of Josyp Stalin holds your attention until his face turns black while dying on the sofa of his villa outside Moscow before he could bring to fruition his murdering of countless more innocent people in his self-created 'Doctor's Plot.' In the end, Stalin fell into his own trap, and helplessly died like all his innocent victims in the tens of millions.In Young Stalin the author studied his subject’s early career under the microscope. This book reveals the personal Stalin - his private life, family life, likes and dislikes, paranoia, psychoticism, rage, and guilt - his private dinners while on vacation in the Crimea and Georgia his conversations with the Politburo members who lived in fear of their lives from Stalin and totally bowed down before him, like Hitler's inner circle, and were constantly being murdered by Stalin and replaced with more sycophants.

His evil is unwavering from the early 1920's until his death in 1953 Stalin plots, deceives, fools, liquidates, anyone he feels threatened by, or annoyed with whether one person or millions of persons.

Because the main character - Josyp Stalin - fascinated like a snake.

The fascination with evil that is how I describe reading this book.

Stalin the court of the red tsar review