Stalin is a Genghis Khan, an unscrupulous intriguer, who sacrifices everything else to the preservation of power … He changes his theories according to whom he needs to get rid of next… Nikolai Bukharin

Joseph Stalin was not a peasant in the classical Russian sense of the term but his origins were certainly mean. Like most who claw their way to the top of a political machine he had no scruples about how he used the machine’s members and no dedication to its principles – self aggrandisement and consolidation of power were his only guiding lights. While we tend to think of the Soviet State in terms of a single personality from Lenin to Putin the truth of the matter is that each leader has had a set of apparatchiks to do their bidding. We have illustrated this entry with members of Stalin’s Politburo – many of whom survived him – but only one of who succeeded him – the true Russian peasant Khrushchev. All of these men served 20 years or more and while most are unknown to us they embody the proof that even tyranny can not exist without administrators.

Voroshilov, Kliment

Master of the house : Stalin and his inner circle  Oleg V. Khlevniuk ; translated by Nora Seligman Favorov  New Haven : Yale University Press, 2009  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xxv, 313 p. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-302) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Molotov, Vyacheslav

Based on previously  unavailable documents in the Soviet archives, this  book illuminates the secret inner mechanisms of power in the Soviet Union during the years when Stalin established his dictatorship.  Khlevniuk focuses on the top organ in Soviet Russia’s political hierarchy of the 1930s — the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party — and on the political and interpersonal dynamics that weakened its collective leadership and enabled Stalin’s rise.

Mikoyan, Anastas

Khlevniuk’s research challenges existing theories of the workings of the Politburo and uncovers many new findings regarding the nature of alliances among Politburo members, Sergei Kirov’s murder, the implementation of the Great Terror, and much more. The author analyzes Stalin’s mechanisms of generating and retaining power and presents a new understanding of the highest tiers of the Communist Party in a crucial era of Soviet history.

Khrushchev, Nikita

Kalinin, Mikhail

Kaganovich, Lazar

Andreyev, Andrey

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. Joseph Stalin

Teheran, Iran. Dec. 1943. Standing outside the Russian Embassy, left to right: Harry Hopkins [U. S. vice-president (appropriately pictured to the left of Stalin!), Stalin’s interpreter, Josef Stalin, Foreign minister Molotov, General Voroshilov. Picture was taken during the Teheran conference…Library of Congress photo

Stalin : the court of the red tsar New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2004 Simon Sebag Montefiore Soviet Union History 1925-1953, Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953 Hardcover. Originally published: London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. 1st. American ed. and printing. xxvii, 785 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [743]-755) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text.  VG/VG

Molotov and Ribbentrop, 1940

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.

Lavrenti Beria

He gives us the details of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalin’s favorites in music, movies, literature (Hemmingway, The Forsyte Saga and The Last of the Mohicans were at the top of his list), food and history (he took Ivan the Terrible as his role model and swore by Lenin’s dictum, “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless”).

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov – Никола́й Иванович Ежо́в – People’s Commissar for State Security

We see him among his courtiers, his informal but deadly game of power played out at dinners and parties at Black Sea villas and in the apartments of the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalin’s inner court, and we see how the dictator played them one against the other in order to hone the awful efficiency of his killing machine.

With stunning attention to detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the members of Stalin’s court. And 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 (there has never been as accurate an 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.

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar gives an unprecedented understanding of Stalin’s dictatorship, and, as well, a Stalin as human and complicated as he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, sensitive and unforgiving.