Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Yakov Djugashvili, son of Stalin’s first marriage to Kato Svanidze.

defiantly un-Russian province of Georgia,

Sicily more than Siberia.

a kinto, Georgian street urchin.

History, he wrote later, is full of “abnormal people.”

Koba, inspired by the hero of a novel, The Parricide, by Alexander Kazbegi,

Stalin identified Trotsky as the main obstacle to his rise.

tremble.” It was here that Stalin grasped the convenience of death as the simplest and most effective political tool

Gradually, the villagers themselves were forced into collectives. Anyone who resisted was a “kulak enemy.”

the Robespierre of Stalin’s court.

Describing Molotov

They unleashed a secret police war in which organized brutality, vicious pillage and fanatical ideology

He was capable of working extraordinarily long hours—sixteen

his real genius was something different—and surprising: “he could charm people.”

Stalin’s lack of smoothness, his anti-oratory, inspired trust.

“Let him sing what he wants.” He paused. “And I think he wants to sing Lensky’s aria from Onegin.”

the inferiority complex that was one of the moving passions of Stalin’s circle.

The magnates were semi-educated autodidacts who never stopped studying,

“Koba loves to receive letters.”

Fasil Iskander’s Abkhazian novel, Sandro of Chegem.

poetry was more respected in Russia, where “people are killed for it,” than anywhere else.

a new edition of the medieval Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin.

he actually punched Molotov in a row over Zinoviev’s book Leninism,

Sergo

changed after Kirov’s death.”

“Five”: Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Yezhov,

Yezhov was the chief organizer of the Terror, with Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov as enthusiastic accomplices.

the Weariness of Hangmen

Stalin may have wanted a Caucasian, perhaps convinced that the cut-throat traditions of the mountains—blood feuds, vendettas and secret murders—suited the position.

Beria waged a quiet campaign to destroy Blackberry:

education is no bar to barbarism.

“I only know that Stalin had one common-law wife. Valechka, his waitress. She loved him.”

Stalin educated himself by reading history, particularly Bismarck’s memoirs,

Molotov joked that he was an Armenian pretending to be Georgian to please Stalin,

He was never a biological racist like the Nazis.

the journalist Koltsov (on whom Karpov in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is based),

“Well what now?” the pacing Stalin asked them. There was silence. The Politburo sat like dummies.

Ivan the Terrible, his “teacher,” had also withdrawn from power to test the loyalty of his boyars.

So had Stalin really suffered a nervous breakdown or was this simply a performance?

There were too many bodies and everyone was too weak to bury them. Cannibalism flourished:

Shtemenko, ordered Sudoplatov to bring 150 Georgian Alpinists, assembled

Now he realized that the road to survival and glory lay with professional generals instead of his own impatient amateurism

War was the natural state of the Bolsheviks and they were good at it.

“Being a Georgian, he SHOULD have shot that ladies’ man,”

the world’s greatest tank battle, Kursk.

Stalin boarded his green railway car,

the United States tested a nuclear bomb in New Mexico that would change everything

Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle:

“Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.”

In common with other human predators, Beria became a vegetarian,

Once, hearing that Svetlana was at Beria’s house, Stalin panicked, rang and told her to leave at once. “I don’t trust Beria.”

She knew that he had other women “but she took a tolerant Georgian view of this.”