Stalin: the court of the red tsar

This widely acclaimed biography provides a vivid and riveting account of Stalin and his courtiers - killers, fanatics, women, and children - during the terrifying decades of his supreme power. In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research and narrative elan, Simon Sebag Montefiore gives us the everyday details of a monstrous life. We see Stalin playing his deadly game of power and paranoia at debauched dinners at Black Sea villas and his magnates carried out the Great Terror and the war against the Nazis, and sexual degeneracy. Montefiore gives us an unprecedented understanding of Stalin's dictatorship, and a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal.