Koba in Technicolor
SHUB, ANATOLE
Koba in Technicolor Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar By Simon Sebag Montefiore Knopf. 816 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Former Washington "Post" Moscow correspondent and USIA...
...Montefiore has relatively little to add to the picture of Khrushchev that emerged from his own memoirs and those of his son Sergei, but there is a great deal new in the author's delineation of most of the others...
...Montefiore acknowledges drawing on these books, but his research went far beyond the standard sources, post-Stalin memoirs and secret Kremlin documents declassified as late as 1999...
...invitation to join in the Marshall Plan...
...He visited Stalin's various offices, apartments, dachas, and rest homes in Moscow, the Crimea and Abkhazia...
...He remained unsure to what extent her act had political implications...
...Chief among the former group were Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Lazar M. Kaganovich, Anastas I. Mikoyan, Andrei A. Zhdanov, Georgi M. Malenkov, Nikita S. Khrushchev, Alexander N. Poskrebyshev and three chiefs of the OGPU/NKVD: Genrikh G. Yagoda, Nikolai I. Yezhov and Lavrenti P. Beria...
...Interviews with service personnel and security guards yield colorful information about how Stalin and those close to him ate, drank and danced, and about their various sex lives...
...About even the world famous Molotov, for example, we learn from private letters how much he loved his Jewish wife, Polina, who was arrested by Stalin largely because of her contacts with Golda Meir, the first Israeli envoy to Moscow...
...The author also devotes attention to ill-fated Stalin allies like Sergei M. Kirov, who was murdered, and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who shot himself...
...That is in no way meant to deprecate the rest—especially the sections on the terror of the 1930s and the War—for all of this impressive biography is illuminating and rich in personal detail...
...Identified, too, are those who declined to see him, out of fear or political mistrust...
...Although there are flashbacks to episodes before 1932, Montefiore spares us the ideological twists and turns of Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and mentions the Comintern only to report its dissolution by Stalin in 1943...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Former Washington "Post" Moscow correspondent and USIA opinion analyst This latest biography of Josef Stalin by British journalist Simon Sebag Montefiore has been praised by a broad range of critics (among them Richard Pipes, Alistair Home, Antonia Fraser, and John le Carré), and rightly so...
...Instead of this traditional baggage of Stalin biographers, he gives us a vivid "technicolor" study that, without scanting political issues, rarely loses sight of not only Stalin's complex personality but those of dozens of his confederates...
...and—perhaps more interesting politically—how Molotov disagreed with Stalin's rejection of the U.S...
...In this respect, even such estimable works as the two-volume study by Robert Tucker, Dmitri Volkogonov's Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy and The Unknown Stalin by Roy and Zhores Medvedev pale in comparison...
...Some shared long-hidden family memoirs or diaries...
...He is also light on the economic problems of "Socialist construction...
...she seems to have been sympathetic to an opposition group led by Martemyan Riutin that in an underground manifesto had described Stalin as "the gravedigger of the Revolution" and demanded his replacement...
...To say it is the best life of Stalin to date would be to damn it with faint praise...
...Indeed, from the standpoint of new material, the chapters on the struggle for power after World War II seem to me the most compelling in the book...
...The author chooses not to recycle the familiar history of the Revolution, the civil war and Stalin's defeat of Old Bolshevik rivals in the 1920s...
...In the manner of In the Lion's Court, Derek Wilson's recent biography of Henry VIII which viewed the Tudor monarch through the experiences of his chief ministers, Montefiore focuses on Stalin's political lieutenants as well as his extended family—his three children (Yakov, Svetlana and Vasili) and the relatives of his two wives, Ekaterina Svanidze and Alliluyeva...
...Malenkov and Zhdanov, whose venomous postwar rivalry climaxed in the infamous "Leningrad case," in which the majority of Zhdanov's allies perished, are portrayed more memorably than in any other study of the period...
...Rather, the narrative starts on the night of November 8, 1932, when Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, left a Kremlin party and committed suicide—an event he brooded over for the rest of his life...
...About Beria, the author reports on his record as a compulsive rapist, on the widely shared opinion that he was the most intelligent of the leaders, and that he, similarly, sought a deal with the West...
...The atmosphere Stalin created for his court, first depicted in Milovan Djilas' Conversations with Stalin (1962), evokes the imperial Roman court described in Suetonius' Twelve Caesars...
...The most enlightening of Montefiore's contacts are dozens of surviving widows, children and grandchildren, many with famous names in Russia...
Vol. 87 • July 2004 • No. 4
