Courts can be a tool for understanding the present as well as the past. The behaviour patterns of courts and courtiers are often a better guide to the workings of modern regimes than constitutions or ideologies. In The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper analysed the government of the Third Reich as a ‘cannibal court’.
In his spectacular new work Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore does the same for the Soviet Union under Stalin. He analyses the lives and ‘informal power and customs’ of the top 20 men in the Soviet leadership, as well as Stalin himself, in the years from the suicide of Stalin’s wife Nadya on 8 November 1932 to his death on 5 March 1953. Sebag Montefiore, author of a brilliant life of the most successful courtier of Catherine the Great, Prince Potemkin, presents the Soviet leadership as a court of magnates, fawning and intriguing around the ‘red Tsar’.
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