Book Review
'Stalin': Inside a tyrant's iron grip, inner circle

By Clarence Brown
Special to The Seattle Times

	FROM "STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR" Joseph Stalin leads Beria, Mikoyan and Malenkov through the Kremlin to the Mausoleum for the 1946 May Day parade.
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First, a personal note: I recall exactly the Army bunk in Andrews Barracks, Frankfurt, Germany, where I heard of the death of Stalin in March 1953. By that time I'd spent a year learning Russian from men and women who had suffered under the fiend and were far from reluctant to tell their story to us young soldiers.

That is part of it.

Later on, several trips to the Soviet Union in 1960 and 1991 acquainted me with several of his victims or coevals: Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip E. Mandelstam, about whom I was writing a book, as well as Anna Akhmatova, a great poet and friend of Osip; writer Ilya Ehrenburg; poet Varlaam Shalamov (who spent 20 years in the camps); author Lev Kopelev; and others.

Author appearance Simon Sebag Montefiore will read from "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" at 7 p.m. April 26 in Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Sponsored by the University Book Store, the Jackson School of International Studies, and the Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies Center (206-634-3400; www.bookstore.washington.edu).

Sitting almost daily at Nadezhda's kitchen table, taking down notes on her husband's life and work, I experienced what life under the monster must have been like: She would occasionally lay a finger on her lips, point to the walls and write down something for me to read — which she would then shred and flush down the toilet.

A year or so afterward, in Princeton, I became acquainted with Stalin's daughter, born Svetlana Stalin, who changed her last name to that of her mother, Nadezhda Alleluyeva. The death of her mother by suicide was perhaps the greatest personal defeat ever endured by Stalin, who had nevertheless, for reasons of state, put out the story that she'd died a natural death. Only years later, by accident (reading a copy of the London Illustrated News), did Svetlana learn the truth.

With apologies for these personal notes, let me say that I could not more admire the work of Montefiore. He has not only profited by the enormously greater availability of archival materials but also by his native ability to penetrate beyond the fog and disguises surrounding the dictator and to come to reasonable conclusions.

True to the subtitle, the court comes in for almost as much attention as the "red tsar" himself. There are vivid portraits of Beria, Bulganin, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Molotov, Yagoda and numerous others. In fact, the only glimmerings of sympathy for the monster at the center arise from the narrative of the alternate fawning and betrayals of these would-be tsars.

"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" by Simon Sebag Montefiore Knopf, 785 pp., $30

Unexpectedly, one also finds details about such foreign leaders as Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman in their encounters with their Russian counterpart. The snapshot of Truman (whom Stalin dismissed as negligible when compared with Roosevelt) all but running after Stalin at the end of the Potsdam conference to take him by the sleeve and announce, as a sort of afterthought, the American creation of an atomic bomb is grimly comic.

The death of Stalin takes place in the midst of the cast of characters and is recounted in almost minute-by-minute detail. Medical observations alternate with the minutiae of the suddenly tumultuous change in the political situation. Svetlana watches her father breathe his last, mercifully unaware of Beria's struggle to conceal his own delight.

Clarence Brown is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton. His translation with W.S. Merwin of the collection "Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems," will be reissued this year by the New York Review of Books.

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