Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar - Simon Sebag Montefiore

I’ve always been fascinated by history. In particular, I’ve always been drawn to those monsters who have managed the unspeakable; things that we can only imagine until people like me and you have actually read first-hand accounts of what went on. There have been many over the centuries and examples of the 20th century include Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin. Their collective propensity for genocide binds them together like an invisible chord and the similarities in their respective psyches is spine chilling yet bears objective inspection. For these reasons, I decided to read the comprehensive “The Court of the Red Tsar” by the wonderfully named ...  Read the complete review

Stalin's one of those guys who is pretty hard to avoid if you have any kind of interest in Twentieth Century history. One of the century's more unpleasant tyrants, he succeeded Lenin as head of the Soviet Union and ruled until his death in 1953. He was responsible for an awful lot of suffering and misery. His style of government can best be described as paranoid, as anyone who was suspected of even the slightest disloyalty to the Communist cause was executed. Millions died as a result of his agricultural policies, and millions more through persecution led by his sinister secret police chiefs - show trials, Siberian gulags and all the rest of that bad stuff. He invaded ...  Read the complete review

The Terror, the Terror, oh the Terror of the Russian people in the 1930's. This is a book about the total rule of Stalin from the early thirties until his death in 1952. Its written by Simon Sebaq Montefiore, a cambridge historian who has compiled a huge piece of work looking at the totalitarian state created by Stalin in the 1930's. Montefiore has continued his work on Stalin with the follow up novel Young Stalin. This is a huge piece of work, the hardback version comes in at over 600 pages, with extensive appendixes, quotes and indices. The author uses the technique of writting paragraphs where occassional moments are starred and further details ...  Read the complete review

This review is on a book that for me is an interesting subject matter, though for others it may repulse them. The subject in question is one man, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili. A man who is remembered by one name and that is 'Stalin'. Before I even read this book I knew that Stalin was a man who had the word 'terror' linking his name, yet I did not really understand all the events. So why, how and when did a man from humble beginnings in a remote town in Georgia, rise to become one of the most feared and revered dictators of the 20th Century? What does this book tell us about the man who took Lenin's Bolshevik ideology and made it his own and in doing so sealed a ...  Read the complete review