Dictator revealed (2006)

Book Review from the March 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Simon Sebag Montefiore Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Orion, £9.99.

Montefiore’s blockbuster is a mighty, novel-like biography of Stalin and the evil apparatchik that attained the economic and political dominance of a ruling class in Russia following on the Bolshevik coup d’etat of 1917. But don’t look for explanations of the Bolshevik phenomenon or why someone like Lenin, closely familiar with the writings of Marx, Engels and the pioneers of scientific socialism, should lay the foundations for the establishment of an empire at least on a par with the concurrent social evil of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

All things within the wide ambit of the awful world of Joseph Stalin’s Russia are explicable to Montefiore in terms of an ill-conceived notion of Marxism. His research is punctilious to the extent where he can report dialogue between some of the most nefarious characters to (dis)grace European history between capitalism’s two world wars. With minute precision he reports the economic lunacies of the forced collectivisation period, the mass murder of literally millions of peasants, the grim destruction of the lives of men, women and children who are made enemies because they are not deemed to be friends; here and there is the profanity of humour within this coterie of evil men with power over life and death who themselves are beholden to a master with power over their life and death. And all this is put down by Montefiore as a consequence of a contamination by ‘Marxism’, a claim with as much justification as blaming god for the ravages of a tsunami; a claim unsupported by the pointed absence of any of Marx’s writings from the generous bibliography.

The fact that the author knows nothing about Marxism, while clearly doing no service to that subject, perhaps rescues the narrative from a taxing analysis that might have impeded this grim, gossipy biography of men and women striving for power with the tenacity of private entrepreneurial billionaires because power in state capitalism, like money in ‘western’ capitalism, is truly a universal medium of exchange.

Stalin is an easy read, perhaps a little tedious in its replication and its ‘facts’ coloured often in that they are the post-Stalin ‘justifications’ by Stalin’s surviving accomplices or relatives of both friends and foes still extant. In summary, Montefiore is an good writer, a good storyteller and a lousy historian.

Richard Montague