Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a 2003 popular history book by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It focuses on the private life of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his closest political associates from the late 1920s through to his death in 1953, covering the period of collectivization, the Moscow show trials, the purges, World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The research for the book privileged "letters, telegrams and diaries of [Stalin's] intimate associates" among the newly available archival material. It drew in particular on Stalin's papers from the Presidential Archive in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, opened in 1999. Montefiore also conducted interviews with surviving descendants of Stalin's inner circle in Rostov-on-Don, Georgia and Abkhazia "about what they saw and heard as adolescent members of the Soviet elite". The book discusses Stalin's "personal idiosyncrasies", including his tastes in food, footwear, architecture, "literature, music and history"), as well as his family life and mental health, and portrays him as "a man who liked to throw parties, flirt with women, play billiards, dandle babies on his knee and sing the Orthodox hymns…
