He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalins favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemmingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenins dictum, A revolution without firing squads is meaningless). Through the lens of personalityStalins as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among themthe author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalins court from the time of his acclamation as leader in 1929, five years after Lenins death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of seventy-three. But though the facts of Stalins reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundationhuman, psychological and physicalthat supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him The almost unfathomable scale of his crimesas many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulaghas given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century.
Xxvii, 785 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : 21 cmįifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination.
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