He starves a whole class – the Kulaks – to death because their entrepreneurial farming was deemed a threat to collectivism. In this real-life version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Stalin has a police state searching for ‘enemies’ everywhere. He had not been exactly benign before it: after it he became a psychopath. Mr Montefiore takes Nadya Stalin’s suicide – with a pearl-handled revolver given to her by her brother as a souvenir of a trip he had made to Berlin – as a turning point in her husband’s warped life. Stalin’s own appalling character drives a young wife to suicide he then proceeds to exterminate a substantial proportion of a whole nation. There are superb pen-portraits of all the other main hate figures: Moltov, Kaganovich, Khruschev and Mikoyan. The author rushes over the first 40 or so years of Stalin’s life, then deals, in meticulous detail, with every aspect of Stalin’s everyday life as he seizes power in the Soviet Union and seeks, by ruthless means, to hold onto it.
When one has read the catalogue of mass murders, arbitrary exercises of evil and sheer paranoia that were the everyday products of ‘Uncle Joe’s’ court, it becomes astonishing that anyone could ever whitewash this monster again. I say ‘so far’ because this magnificent book by Simon Sebag Montefiore is sure to help strip some of the remaining veneer of decency from Hitler’s closest rival, Joseph Stalin. History has had it – so far – that the genocidal maniac Adolf Hitler was the past century’s most vile dictator. Country Life's Top 100 architects, builders, designers and gardeners.
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