Montefiore (The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin) is more interested in life at the top than at the bottom, so he includes hundreds of pages on Stalin's purges of top Communists, while devoting much less space to the forced collectivization of Soviet peasants that led to millions of deaths. In lively prose, he intersperses his mammoth account of Stalin's often-deadly political decisions with the personal lives of the Soviet dictator and those around him. As a result, the reader learns about sexual peccadilloes of the top Communists: Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, for one, "craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players." Stalin's own escapades after the death of his wife are also noted. There's also much detail about the food at parties and other meetings of Stalin's henchmen. The effect is paradoxical: Stalin and his cronies are humanized at the same time as their cruel misdeeds are recounted. Montefiore offers little help in answering some of the unsettled questions surrounding Stalin: how involved was he in the 1934 murder of rising official Sergei Kirov, for example. He also seems to leave open the question of Stalin's paranoia: he argues that the Georgian-born ruler was a charming man who used his people skills to get whatever he wanted. Montefiore mainly skirts the paranoia issue, noting that only after WWII, when Stalin launched his anti-Semitic campaigns, did he "become a vicious and obsessional anti-Semite." There are many Stalin biographies out there, but this fascinating work distinguishes itself by its extensive use of fresh archival material and its focus on Stalin's ever-changing coterie. Maps and 24 pages of photos not seen by PW. Agent, Georgina Capel. (Apr.) Forecast: With a 75,000 first printing, this is likely to draw in Slavophiles and history buffs. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The mission of this large work by Montefiore (Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin) is to "go beyond the traditional explanations of Stalin as `enigma,' `madman,' or `Satanic genius' and that of his comrades as `men without biographies,' dreary moustachioed sycophants in black-and-white photographs." In other words, he seeks to reorient our historical perspective by giving us a more intimate account of these men. To do so, he places Stalin and his "oligarchs" in idiosyncratic Bolshevik context as members of a military-religious "order of sword-bearers," getting up close and personal as he describes relationships among the most notable of Stalin's courtiers, including Molotov, Beria, Yezhov, Zhadanov, Kaganovich, and Khrushchev. Montefiore echoes such contemporary works as Roy Medvedev's The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death, and Legacy and Jonathan Brent's Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953, but he also goes beyond them. For instance, he describes the last days of Stalin in greater detail than have other authors. While Montefiore does not humanize his subjects, he does make them more understandable, if no less repellant. Recommended for academic libraries and public libraries with a strong Soviet/Russian collection. Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Because of its extraordinary detail, this portrait of Joseph Stalin is as realistic as is currently historically possible. Relying on Stalin's personal correspondence with his family and his magnates, as Montefiore terms the dictator's lieutenants, the author liberally quotes letters, memoirs, and interviews he conducted with survivors in his book chronicling the years 1929-53. Through vignettes of a typical vacation, night at the Kremlin office, or drunken party at the dacha, the author evokes the atmosphere of Stalin's entourage. Stalin could be charming, Montefiore reports. Magnates and their wives bantered with the leader; lesser lieges wisely aped his pronouncements. But beneath the bonhomie was a substrate of mortal danger. Montefiore emphasizes Stalin's feral suspiciousness throughout, his feigned modesty masking his megalomania, his patience in exacting sadistic revenge. Those traits are exhibited in the fatal fallout from this work's opening scene, the 1932 suicide of Stalin's wife, Nadya, and then metastasize in descriptions of Stalin's conspiratorial milestones, from the likely arranged 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov to the Doctor's Plot of 1953. By illustrating how Stalin acted in private, Montefiore has produced a landmark work that rounds out political biographies of the tyrant. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2004 Booklist

Montefiore has written an extraordinary account of Stalin the man, the politician, and the ideologue. With unprecedented access to Stalin's private papers, unpublished archives, and personal interviews, the author paints the most comprehensive and insightful portrait of Stalin yet produced. This brilliant biography of the 20th century's most cruel and powerful dictator shows how Stalin wielded power, manipulated friends, and checkmated foes. Every page offers new information and fascinating detail. From collectivization and the purges to the Yalta Conference and the Cold War, the author reveals Stalin to be a brutal, brilliant, paranoid leader who was bereft of conscience but committed to the revolutionary goals of Marxism-Leninism. Stalin personifies Lord Acton's dictum that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but in frightful terms--a world where there is no objective morality, only the absurd goals of an untested ideology that is itself constantly altered by the whims of the leader and the self-appointed elite. The book has an excellent bibliography and index. ^BSumming Up: Essential. All libraries. D. J. Dunn Texas State University-San Marcos

A fascinating, superbly written study of the Red Emperor Josef Stalin, "an energetic and vainglorious melodramatist who was exceptional in every way." Stalin, the one-time seminarian from Georgia, was at once a ruthlessly efficient administrator and a born outlaw (during the Civil War he funded his guerrilla activities by robbing banks), capable of commanding both fear and respect, though always preferring the former. He was careful throughout his long rule to surround himself with equally capable if easily intimidated lieutenants, whom the young British historian/novelist Montefiore (Enigma, 2001, etc.) characterizes wonderfully: Stalin's favorite secret policeman, Genrikh Yagoda, "a ferret-faced Jewish jeweler's son from Nizhny Novgorod with a 'Hitlerish moustache' and a taste for orchids, German pornography, and literary friendships"; Vyacheslav Molotov, the Marxist true believer, "small, stocky, with a bulging forehead, chilling hazel eyes blinking behind round spectacles, and a stammer when angry (or talking to Stalin)." They created an extraordinary terror state indeed, so terrible that Stalin's iron-hard Bolshevik wife committed suicide after it became clear that he had thoroughly betrayed the revolution (and behaved monstrously toward her to boot). Yet there were some curious blind spots in Stalin's total state, as well as in his understanding of the world: for all the evidence to the contrary, for instance, he could not believe that Hitler was planning an invasion of the Soviet Union, growling, "Germany will never fight Russia on her own" (and Germany didn't: Hitler brought allies to the fight) and insisting that the German attacks of June 1941 were the work of renegade generals, not of Hitler himself. "The duel between those two brutal and reckless egomaniacs," as Montefiore puts it, bled Russia dry and nearly brought Stalin's government down; but the terror state would fall only with Stalin's death in 1953, whereupon his surviving aides, "relieved to be alive," were dumped into the ashbin of history. There is much news here (including the fate of Hitler's bones), and much to ponder. Altogether extraordinary, and required reading for anyone interested in world affairs. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.