The Red Tsar covers the deterioration with documented precision, as Stalin, against whose character and ambitions Lenin had personally warned the central committee, plays both ends against the middle with diabolical astuteness. Carr has called ‘the twenty years’ crisis’ – saw the mutual relations among the comrades become far less comradely after the death of Lenin in 1924, leaving a power vacuum and a succession to be fought for. The inter-war years – what the British arch-historian of Bolshevism E. That cordial, family atmosphere was not to last. Parents and children saw each other constantly.’ The magnates held parties and took holidays together. The euphoric flush of triumph masked schisms, and the leaders – ‘magnates’ is Montefiore’s term – who moved into the Kremlin ‘were always in and out of each other’s houses. The party’s internal conflicts had already been bubbling under, prompting Lenin to forbid intra-party factions (fat chance). I believe Montefiore’s subtitle is aptly chosen much of the fascination of the book lies in its dramatic picture of an imperial régime and its distinctive cast of senior Bolsheviks – ‘magnates’ in the author’s estimation – competing for the approval of the enthroned all-powerful one, dancing to his tune (sometimes literally) and mortally fearful of antagonising him.īut that wasn’t immediate. By the time of his death in 1953 the bookish Georgian desperado had become a world statesman and paranoid dictator atop a mountain of corpses and a heavily policed population finding solace in vodka. The Red Tsar was embroiled with civil war, radical reconstruction of the Soviet economy at a terrifying human cost, a calculating and merciless struggle to eliminate virtually all of the old Bolshevik leadership who opposed him, World War 2 and the first years of the Cold War. In this epic volume he expands his approach, while still paying attention to detail, to take in a panorama of Stalin’s years as a member of a revolutionary government during years of unceasing turbulence. In Young Stalin the author studied his subject’s early career under the microscope.
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