There is a degree of calculated risk involved in any such undertaking. We are introduced to a Stalin of frighteningly human proportions, a man fully capable of love, grief and sorrow. Access to new documents enables Montefiore to introduce the reader to a new Stalin, or perhaps more correctly, to allow Stalin’s own words to demolish the layers of myth and obfuscation that have accrued. This focus allows for an unsettling degree of intimacy with previously fearsome (or purposefully obscured) figures such as Beria, Molotov and Khrushchev, not to mention Stalin himself. The hook behind Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest contribution to the strange world of Stalin studies places the figure of Stalin in the foreground through a focus on previously classified letters and memos from the archives of the former Soviet Union. It is the human element of Stalin, the contradictory, unsettling, often paradoxical evidence of the man himself that renders his interior life invisible, and which stubbornly resists explication or explanation.
Save for a few nagging mysteries, what Stalin did is well understood. Although there is no shortage of ink to be spent on explaining the inexplicable, the life of Stalin remains almost as much of a mystery now as it was 50 years ago.
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