but also because they emerge in these pages as surprisingly normal.” - The Washington Post Book World “Unprecedented in its intimacy and horrifying in its implications, not merely because it shows that the engineers of one of history’s greatest holocausts were depraved.

A deeply researched and wonderfully readable accomplishment-scholarship as a kind of savage gossip.” - Time A dark and excellent book.” - The New York Review of Books Disturbing and perplexing.” - The New York Times Book Review “The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler. For anyone fascinated by the nature of evil-and by the effects of absolute power on human relationships-this book will provide new insights on every page.” -Anne Applebaum, Evening Standard (London) Maps and 24 pages of photos not seen by PWįorecast: With a 75,000 first printing, this is likely to draw in Slavophiles and history buffs.“An extraordinary book. Montefiore mainly skirts the paranoia issue, noting that only after WWII, when Stalin launched his anti-Semitic campaigns, did he 'become a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite.' There are many Stalin biographies out there, but this fascinating work distinguishes itself by its extensive use of fresh archival material and its focus on Stalin's ever-changing coterie. He also seems to leave open the question of Stalin's paranoia: he argues that the Georgian-born ruler was a charming man who used his people skills to get whatever he wanted.

Montefiore offers little help in answering some of the unsettled questions surrounding Stalin: how involved was he in the 1934 murder of rising official Sergei Kirov, for example. The effect is paradoxical: Stalin and his cronies are humanized at the same time as their cruel misdeeds are recounted. There's also much detail about the food at parties and other meetings of Stalin's henchmen. As a result, the reader learns about sexual peccadilloes of the top Communists: Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, for one, 'craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players.' Stalin's own escapades after the death of his wife are also noted. In lively prose, he intersperses his mammoth account of Stalin's often-deadly political decisions with the personal lives of the Soviet dictator and those around him. ) is more interested in life at the top than at the bottom, so he includes hundreds of pages on Stalin's purges of top Communists, while devoting much less space to the forced collectivization of Soviet peasants that led to millions of deaths. Montefiore ( The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin

In the court of the red tsar