Books
His red right hand
by Tony Simpson
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, By Simon Sebag Montefiore
About 30 years ago, I had lunch in Moscow as the guest of some high-ranking officials of the then Soviet Cultural Workers’ Union. They didn’t seem to be a particularly
sinister lot, although I was told afterwards that the man referred to vaguely as “an associate of the international department” was, in fact, a colonel in the KGB; all I can say is that he was very polite to me. And one of them, I discovered during the course of a rather convivial meal, was a member of the Politburo who had survived under Stalin. Suddenly he didn’t look quite such an avuncular old bloke; to survive under Stalin, I figured, meant he must have been fairly fast on his feet. Now that I have read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin, I am able to confirm that my hunch was right.
Of course, by the time I studied Russian politics and economy at university in the 60s, after Hungary in 1956 and the Khruschev revelations, not even the New Zealand Communist Party thought Uncle Joe was an old darling who had been traduced by the wicked capitalist media. But now that the Soviet archives are opening, the full story has begun to emerge in all its horrors. This is one of the fruits of that process. It isn’t a pleasant read, but it’s certainly a fascinating one.
Stalin emerges as a terrifying blend of political ruthlessness, administrative acumen, low cunning, sentimentality, paranoia and sadism. Hanging out in political circles is always a risky business, but in this case the gulag seems almost preferable to being locked up in the same cage as him. Some of his closer confederates got the chance to compare the two experiences. For nearly three decades Stalin ruled his Russian empire with an iron hand and barely a stumble. Only the mysterious suicide of his wife Nadya seems to have come anywhere near to unsettling him. And, as he aged and his physical and mental health deteriorated, the cruel surreality of his immediate world seems to have heightened year on year.
No one was safe. As time went by, executioner became victim with almost inevitable, random and frightening ease. The denunciation of friend by friend became increasingly shrill as each struggled to survive at the expense of the other. No one can possibly have believed the wild denunciations that were the price of this survival – not even Stalin himself – and not even the wildest denunciation ensured that survival for long. At one level this book is the story of a long line of the mighty falling.
But all of this is relatively well known. It was two other things about the world described in the book that fascinated me much more than its sombre catalogue of terror and death. While all this was going on, the participants were living an apparently pleasant life as a sort of extended family. There were parties and picnics, visits to one another’s homes, holidays in the country or at the seaside, and game hunts. Stalin’s children, his daughter Svetlana, and the lesser known Yakov and Vasily, were meanwhile playing the usual children’s games quite normally with the children of associates who might at any moment become enemies of the state and be marked for execution, their families disgraced, and their playmates suddenly vanished.
The second fascinating thing was the cast of minor characters who largely didn’t change – General Nikolai Vlasik, Stalin’s personal bodyguard and photo-grapher, for instance, or Blohkin, the chief executioner, who wore a leather butcher’s apron over his uniform to protect it from blood splashes – a strange menagerie of grotesques that made up the lower level of the court, and whose usefulness, even weirdly perhaps the comfort of their familiarity, ensured their survival.
This book is aptly subtitled. Although some of the real-life nightmare it describes was to do with totalitarian communism, its comprehension has much more to do with the bloodstained traditions of tsarist despotism. Truly, as Winston Churchill is said to have remarked, “Democracy is the most flawed system of government in the world – apart from all the others.”
STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Phoenix, $32.95).
