Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar

This widely acclaimed biography provides a vivid and riveting account of Stalin and his courtierskillers, fanatics, women, and childrenduring the terrifying decades of his supreme power. In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research and narrative ?lan, Simon Sebag Montefiore gives us the everyday details of a monstrous life. We see Stalin playing his deadly game of power and paranoia at debauched dinners at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We witness first-hand how the dictator and his magnates carried out the Great Terror and the war against the Nazis, and how their families lived in this secret world of fear, betrayal, murder, and sexual degeneracy. Montefiore gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin's dictatorship, and a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, who was born in 1965, read history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He spent much of the nineties traveling through the former Soviet empire, particularly the Caucasus, Ukraine and Central Asia, covering their wars and turmoil, and writing widely on Russia, Georgia and Chechnya, especially for the Sunday Times, the New York Times, The New Republic and the Spectator. Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin was published in 2000 and short-listed for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper and Marsh Biography prizes. The author of two novels and the presenter of television documentaries, he lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.


From the Hardcover edition.