Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of effective and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes–as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag–has given him the enduring distinction being a personification of bad in the twentieth century. But although facts of Stalin’s reign are popular, this impressive biography reveals a Stalin we’ve never noticed before as it illuminates the vast foundation–human, mental and physical–that about Stalin: The Court of the Crimson Tsar supported and motivated him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in concern with him and, generally, had been betrayed by him.

Within a seamless meshing of exhaustive study, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life span 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 age 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 brand-new light around the oligarchy that attemptedto create a new world by exterminating the previous. He gives us the facts of their quotidian and monstrous lives: Stalin’s favorites in music, films, literature (Hemmingway, The Forsyte Saga as well as the Last of the Mohicans were near the top of his list), meals and history (he required Ivan the Terrible as his part model and swore by Lenin’s dictum, “A trend without firing squads is usually meaningless”). We find him among his courtiers, his casual but deadly game of power performed out at dinners and celebrations at Black Ocean villas and in the flats from the Kremlin. We see the debauchery, paranoia and cravenness that ruled the lives of Stalin’s internal court, and we see how the dictator performed them one against the other to be able to hone the dreadful effectiveness of his killing machine.

With stunning focus on detail, Montefiore documents the crimes, small and large, of all the people of Stalin’s court. And he traces the complex and shifting internet of their romantic relationships as the relative friendliness of Stalin’s rule in the early 1930s gives method to the fantastic Terror of the past due 1930s, the upheaval of Globe War II (there’s by no means been as acute an account of Stalin’s get together at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt) as well as the horrific postwar years when he terrorized his closest associates as unrelentingly as he did the others of his nation.

Stalin: The Courtroom of the Crimson Tsar offers an unprecedented understanding of Stalin’s dictatorship, and, as well, a Stalin as individual and complicated while he is brutal. It is a galvanizing portrait: razor-sharp, delicate and unforgiving.