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). 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. A fascinating, superbly written study of the Red Emperor Josef Stalin, “an energetic and vainglorious melodramatist who was exceptional in every way.”

Stalin book red tsar