Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

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THERE are literally hundreds of books about Stalin, the dictator who for a quarter of a century tyrannized the Soviet Union and kept much of the world on tenterhooks. But because his private life was so closely shielded, the vast bulk of this material concentrated on his domestic and foreign policies rather than on his person. As a consequence, his image was blurred: an immensely powerful historic figure, he remained incomprehensible as a human being, a distant and shadowy apparition, a demigod.

''Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,'' by the British journalist and novelist Simon Sebag Montefiore, reverses this approach: it pays minimal attention to Stalin's politics and concentrates on the man and his immediate associates. This was made possible by the author's access to previously secret private documents, including Stalin's notes and messages, as well as by interviews with the surviving offspring of his closest companions. In addition, Montefiore has made an exhaustive study of the published literature. The result is the first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler and yet, according to opinion polls, is regarded by Russians even today as a giant, the fourth greatest human being in world history.



The picture that emerges from ''Stalin'' is both disturbing and perplexing. In the early chapters of Montefiore's narrative Stalin is already the unchallenged ruler of the Soviet Union, surrounded by toadies ready to carry out his every whim. His youth and rise to power are disposed of in a mere 12 pages. Barely mentioned are the industrialization program, which drove Soviet living standards to unparalleled lows, or collectivization, which re-enserfed Russian peasants, causing millions of deaths from starvation.

What we do learn is that Stalin had an unexpected human side to his personality. He could sentence thousands of innocent people to death with a stroke of the pen and then go to his private cinema to enjoy an American cowboy movie, yet he could also display affection and tenderness. The book opens with a prologue describing the suicide of his wife in 1932, a tragedy that, according to Montefiore, shattered him for life. There are numerous examples of Stalin's affection for his children and friends of his youth. And he looked after his associates, making sure they took good care of themselves. Once, when Artyom Mikoyan, designer of the MIG aircraft, ''suffered angina and was put to bed, he was aware of someone coming into his room and tenderly laying a blanket over him. He was amazed to see it was Stalin.''



These manifestations of humanity are supplemented with evidence that Stalin had intellectual aspirations. He displayed a passionate interest in history; at the height of World War II he spent his spare time reading about ancient Greece. After the war, as he was about to leave on vacation, he ordered a library of books that included volumes of Shakespeare, Herzen, Goethe's letters, ''Poetry of the French Revolution'' and a history of the Seven Years' War.

How to reconcile such manifestations of humanity and intellectualism with the persistent sadism, clinical paranoia and debauchery that fill so many of the pages of this book? For life at Stalin's court was a kind of Grand Guignol, dominated by the unpredictable and irrational behavior of the leader -- with his ''swarthy pock-marked face, gray hair, broken stained teeth and yellow Oriental eyes'' -- who kept his entourage in constant dread of his outbursts. People were expelled from his presence for no apparent reason, sometimes simply demoted, sometimes arrested and tortured. In 1937 he had the Politburo formally authorize physical torture of ''enemies of the people,'' and he would add the words ''Beat, beat!'' next to a victim's name.



His cronies learned to anticipate his moods in diverse ways, even from gestures he made with his pipe: ''Stalin was always pacing up and down. There were various warning signals of a black temper: if the pipe was unlit, it was a bad omen. If Stalin put it down, an explosion was imminent. Yet if he stroked his mustache with the mouthpiece of the pipe, this meant he was pleased.''

Richard Pipes is a professor emeritus of history at Harvard and the author, most recently, of ''Vixi: The Memoirs of a Non-Belonger.''