JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW OF SIMON MONTEFIORE’S STALIN THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

This book is not a complete biography of Stalin: rather its subject is just what its subtitle says it is, the court of the Red Tsar. Naturally, the period of Stalin’s having a court covers the most important part of his life.

The author spent years gathering documents and remembrances from survivors in Russia. As well, he had unprecedented access to the Stalin archives. His patient collection of new information shows in the book’s many fascinating anecdotes, ranging from bizarre to horrifying.

For those familiar with the career of Stalin, the book has no great shocking revelations. Rather it is in its anecdotes we gain grim new details of this almost unprecedented tyranny. The contrast in court life before the first great terror, 1937, and after; Stalin’s intense interference with the personal lives of his colleagues, whom the author nicely terms the magnates; Stalin’s endless lists of names carefully checked off; certain glimpses of Stalin’s wartime behaviour; and details of Stalin’s death – all these and more are new stories and add detail and nuance to our understanding of one of history’s greatest monsters.

Stalin, by the reckoning given here, was the second greatest mass-murderer in human history, surpassed only in the sheer volume of victims by Chairman Mao, but such counts are never accurate even with good archives because so many of the events in those horrifying regimes were disguised or unreported.

When Stalin wanted a prominent person killed, often the act was disguised as something like an automobile accident. Beria, one of his chief killers, sometimes employed poisons, reminding one of a prince in the court of the Borgias, and he may have done so in the end with the Vozhd himself as Stalin became obviously senile and busied himself with still new terrors in the early 1950s, ones aimed at doctors, Jews, and Mingrelian speakers from Georgia – the last including Beria himself. All of the magnates in the last days feared another great wave of murder and torture, as they also feared Stalin’s failing mind carelessly risking war with the West.

Stalin believed the government needed regular shaking up. In that he reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the tree of liberty needed new blood every fifteen or twenty years. Stalin also, I believe, simply tired of some of the people with whom he worked for any time. He had such a severe set of standards of behaviour and performance – Stalin was a workaholic - that he grew tired of magnates who, with success, assumed manners that suggested being at odds with his deeply rooted concepts of Bolshevik standards. Above all, Stalin was paranoid about anyone who doubted him or anyone who might challenge him, and his extraordinary ability to read human beings made it close to impossible for anyone to hide their doubts. His relentless intelligence apparatus also fed his doubts or fears about people. Everyone of consequence was bugged, and it only took one casual suggestive remark at home to start Stalin’s thinking about the end of someone’s usefulness.

Stalin’s human-intelligence operation abroad might well have been the greatest ever assembled (it included Kim Philby and the other Cambridge spies in Britain, Richard Sorge in Japan, someone unknown high in the German government, and important people in America’s Manhattan Project) and it provided him with many important tips, but Stalin’s paranoia often caused him to reject the information in a bizarre twist on the Cassandra legend.

Stalin certainly suffered from some form of mental illness: his extreme paranoia alone attests to that. He was also a true psychopath, able to charm and disarm people even while planning to kill them. Stalin had a stare, with yellowy unblinking eyes, that he used often to question or discomfort or threaten people, sometimes terrifying those he was about to destroy. He enjoyed, like a cat with a captured mouse, toying with his victims. It was a significant sport for him during his campaigns against magnates or officials. His sense of humor was crude, and he enjoyed throwing bits of orange peel or wine corks at his dinner guests. He sometimes greeted officials or friends with questions like “haven’t they arrested you yet?” But, as Montefiore tells us, he was exceptionally intelligent and, like Hitler, he had a prodigious memory.

But of course, most of his killing was not competitors, their families, authors or artists who displeased him, but millions of ordinary people: the millions of kulaks (successful farmers, the beginnings of a Russian middle class) he arrested and tortured and killed, the millions of Ukrainians whom he deliberately consigned to starvation (on the order of 10 to 12 million), and various other national groups from Poles to Germans who were killed by the hundreds of thousands. Stalin had a godlike stance towards the suffering and deaths of millions of victims: what happened was simply necessary, like a gardener pulling weeds, in working towards the ideals of Bolshevism.

I believe the author has straightened out the conflicting tales of Stalin’s behaviour in the first days of Hitler’s invasion. There have been many conflicting stories in reputable books about whether Stalin crumpled into a useless drunken heap or kept his steely grip.
The author has given us more information about Stalin’s death, but the picture remains unclear in some details. Here again, reputable books have contained conflicting stories.

Rich with new information, the book is not without faults. Indeed, it has several significant ones.

The index, I realize in writing this review, is seriously inadequate to the size and complexity of the book’s subject matter. I recall specific events or descriptions, but when I try finding them in the index by several possible routes, there are no adequate references.

The book has an episodic nature in which years at a time on some subjects disappear. There is also the sometimes annoying practice of a very brief fact tacked on to a passage, almost a non sequitur, I assume just to employ material people had supplied the author.

The writing varies between quite good and not so good. For example, Riumin, one of his last killers, is described at the start of Chapter 56 as “…plump and balding, stupid and vicious….” Yet in the same paragraph, Riumin is said to have completed a good education (for that day) and qualified as an accountant, hardly the achievement of a stupid person, especially in those days of much more stringent school requirements. This kind of thing is fairly common through the book, and it is annoying, being the result I suggest of the author’s readiness to dash off colorful descriptions of new characters which later prove less than accurate as their tales are told.

Despite its shortcomings, the book is an indispensable source for students of the Soviet Union, Stalin, tyranny, modern European history, and psychology.

JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW OF DAVID CECIL’S MELBOURNE

Here is that rare thing, a beautiful book, gracefully written and displaying genuine scholarship, Lord David Cecil’s biography of William Lamb, Lord Melbourne.

Melbourne was prime minister to the eighteen-year old Queen Victoria when she assumed the monarch’s role and had first to deal with the complex and perplexing demands of being head of state. It was a time when the monarchy no longer ruled but retained considerable importance in British society and political affairs. He became Victoria’s intimate advisor and friend, a role perhaps unlike that of any other prime minister in British history.

Cecil’s style perfectly suits his subject – graceful, learned, thoughtful - a rare harmony in biography. The author admires his subject, although well aware of Melbourne’s limitations, and I tend to favour biographers who are not hostile.

Melbourne was a controversial figure for a number of reasons, but especially owing to his role in the early years of Victoria’s reign. One can imagine the feelings of the opposition party over his special relationship with the Queen, and we read a fair amount about it here. Victoria had an unpleasant childhood with an intense and overwhelming mother, who worked to shape her daughter to her own purposes, and little contact with her father. Melbourne provided an advisor of matchless charm and understanding and sophistication, filling a place in her young life as something of a father figure, intimate friend, and truly expert political and protocol advisor.

Victoria filled an important place in Melbourne’s life too, for Melbourne was a man who loved the society of women. While as a young man he had many love affairs - behaviour typical of his Whig aristocracy class in the late 18th century and early 19th, a period called the Regency era and marking the transition from Georgian England to Victorian - he was not a Les Liaisons dangereuses type of character but a man who was perfectly capable of having happy and affectionate relationships with women. Indeed, he absolutely needed such relationships. When his government fell and he lost the Prime Minister’s access to Victoria, there was a haunting emptiness to his last years.

This is not a definitive biography, and it was certainly not intended to be one, but it tells us the main stories of Melbourne’s life, both personal and political. It is perhaps more than anything else a study in human character. Melbourne was an interesting man, highly polished and intelligent, and one of the last of the Regency era’s privileged Whig statesmen. To a considerable degree, he was already outdated by the time he was given great political power, although deep understanding of human nature is never outdated. There are wonderful glimpses here too of Queen Victoria as an uncertain 18-year old thrown into the role of official head of the world’s great empire.

Melbourne was something of a reluctant politician, being most comfortable with dinner parties, good company, and good books. The extent to which he was active in some reforms was not so much from his personal convictions in the matters but from his conviction that society changed and laws must accommodate the change. His greatest horror was civil unrest and the threat of a repeat of the French Revolution, and he believed in not creating any tensions or popular hopes which could not be fulfilled. Ironically, he lived through a time of tremendous unrest in England, the unrest that pushed a long series of reforms, from parliamentary representation to Catholic emancipation in Ireland and to the repeal of the Corn Laws, the last having been the very foundation of the Whig class’s privileged place in society.

Melbourne’s underlying strength of character is displayed in his relationship with his wife, a beautiful, frail woman who appears to have suffered from late-onset schizophrenia. Despite the many embarrassments she caused him, including a tempestuous and very public love affair with Lord Byron, he stood by her until the end. And just so with any friend or intimate companion, including the Queen, he stood by them, often taking blame for matters of which he was not the cause, rather than betray friendship.

Recommended for all students of British history, students of human psychology, those who love good biography, and those who simply love books.