Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix 2004
I’ve just had a month with Stalin – just about enough for anybody. This huge book (helpfully divided up into two volumes in the edition I had) details his life and many crimes during the three decades he ruled the Soviet Union. As you might imagine, it’s not an easy read. This is partly because of the subject matter: during the account of the pre-war “terror” with its millions dead, I became inured to the relentless atrocities, and the story of Russians’ relentless and determined defence of their country in the Second World War and their later bloody retribution is equally overwhelming . However, it is also a matter of style, as Montefiore seems to me to be in need of a good editor, or at the very least a few lessons in punctuation, especially in the first half. There the randomness of his paragraphing, his clumsy sentences, and his “inclusive” approach to the mass of evidence he has accumulated (he’s done the work and doesn’t see why anything, even the most meagre scribbled note should be left out) left me often confused. The huge lists of people (many with both formal and informal variants of their names) most of whom would end up dead, tortured, or expelled, caused me similar headaches. However, the second half is different: better written, with a clearer narrative, and more selective (although on at least two occasions we are told the same story twice). In the end I was glad I read this book. It gives a picture of a man who was both a ruthless Machiavellian politician with at least twenty million victims to his name, and the sentimental “Uncle Joe” who, in the same manner as Auden’s tyrant (see below), would buy sweets for crying children or give lifts to his bedraggled countrymen if he saw them waiting at a bus stop. The countrymen were understandably nervous as, although it certainly didn’t pay to be Stalin’s enemy, it didn’t pay to be too much in his favour either, because in the end his paranoiac fear of rivals would probably mean you ended up in a labour camp or worse either way. During his last illness his aides were unwilling to fetch medical help for twelve hours just in case he was bluffing; they knew in what way, if he recovered, he would treat those who had had the gall to presume him weak. When the doctors did eventually arrive they weren’t the best: the best had been murdered during the anti-semitic “doctors’ plot” pogrom, just as in 1941, when Germany attacked Russia, Stalin found that all his best generals had been executed or were being tortured or in labour camps. This grim, enthralling book is full of blackly comic revelations like this (I liked, for example, the account of his deputies chasing him around trying to present him with a “Hero of the Soviet Union” medal which he would “modestly” decline until he felt it was time to “unwillingly” accept it). Despite these “lighter” moments this is a long, draining journey, however. Appropriate really.
15th December 2009
Epitaph on a Tyrant by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
See also: House of Meetings; Koba the Dread
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