A monster in the making

One day in 1915, when Stalin was in exile in Siberia, he was eating dinner with a few other revolutionaries. Everyone had to say what his greatest pleasure was. Some said women, others — can this be true? — ‘earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise’. Stalin, known then as ‘Soso’ or ‘Koba’, replied, ‘My greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.’

In Number 10 and the White House there may be those who would like to slake their implacable vengeances, but — and for once I am grateful for our pipsqueak leaders — they cannot murder their rivals, old comrades and relatives. In the epilogue to this magnificent ‘prequel’ to his yet more wonderful Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore describes another meal. After 30 years of Soviet power Stalin, an old man now, but still Premier, Generalissimo, and Party General Secretary, is entertaining some of his (surviving) comrades at a mansion overlooking the Black Sea. There is plenty of Georgian food and red wine and Stalin, in nostalgic mood, recalls his two wives, his children by various women, his drunken father, and the escapades of the thugs and bank robbers with whom he had helped fuel Lenin’s plan for the revolution yet to come. Some of the guests murmur condolences for the death of Stalin’s son, Yakov. A mellow scene, indeed. Stalin tells a few anecdotes about certain Old Bolsheviks, not present. There is a slight frisson, ‘for they were people whom Stalin himself had wantonly murdered,’ some, he admits, ‘unjustly’. Over that meal, ‘the fearsome shadow of the Terror, the shameful human cost of the Revolution and the wicked price of Stalin’s lust for power, hung over them all,’ as it does over anyone who reads this book.