| Description |
xxxii, 720 pages, [32 pages] of plates : illustrations, maps, portraits, geneol. tables ; 20 cm |
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regular print |
| Summary |
"Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes - as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag - has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century. But though the facts of Stalin's reign are well known, this biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundation - human, psychological and physical - that supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him." |
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"Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin's court from the time of his acclamation as "leader" in 1929, five years after Lenin's death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of seventy-three. Through the lens of personality - Stalin's as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them - the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old. Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalin's court. He traces the intricate and shifting web of their relationships as the relative warmth of Stalin's rule in the early 1930s gives way to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the upheaval of World War II (with an acute account of Stalin's meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) and the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the rest of his country."--BOOK JACKET |
| Notes |
Originally published in London by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003 |
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Includes index |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references: pages [674]-688 |
| Subject |
Stalin, Joseph, 1878-1953.
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Stalin, Joseph, 1878-1953 -- Friends and associates.
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Statesmen -- Soviet Union -- Biography.
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Statesmen -- Soviet Union -- Social conditions.
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Heads of state -- Soviet Union -- Biography.
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| SUBJECT |
USSR -- Politics and government -- 1936-1953. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125847
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USSR -- Politics and government -- 1917-1936. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125845
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USSR -- History -- 1925-1953. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125814
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| Genre/Form |
Biography.
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History.
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Biographies.
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| ISBN |
0753817667 paperback |
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