He also seems to leave open the question of Stalin's paranoia: he argues that the Georgian-born ruler was a charming man who used his people skills to get whatever he wanted. Montefiore offers little help in answering some of the unsettled questions surrounding Stalin: how involved was he in the 1934 murder of rising official Sergei Kirov, for example. The effect is paradoxical: Stalin and his cronies are humanized at the same time as their cruel misdeeds are recounted. There's also much detail about the food at parties and other meetings of Stalin's henchmen. As a result, the reader learns about sexual peccadilloes of the top Communists: Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, for one, "craved athletic women, haunting the locker rooms of Soviet swimmers and basketball players." Stalin's own escapades after the death of his wife are also noted.
In lively prose, he intersperses his mammoth account of Stalin's often-deadly political decisions with the personal lives of the Soviet dictator and those around him. ) is more interested in life at the top than at the bottom, so he includes hundreds of pages on Stalin's purges of top Communists, while devoting much less space to the forced collectivization of Soviet peasants that led to millions of deaths. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Visiting Professor at Buckingham University, he lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.Montefiore ( The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin He has presented BBC television series on the Holy Cities of Jerusalem, Rome and Istanbul. Dr Montefiore's next major history book will be THE ROMANOVS: RISE AND FALL, 1613-1917. He is also the author of two acclaimed novels, SASHENKA and ONE NIGHT IN WINTER. JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY won the JEWISH BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE (USA). YOUNG STALIN won the COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD (UK), the LA TIME BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY (USA), LE GRAND PRIX DE LA BIOGRAPHIE POLITIQUE (France) and the KREISKY PRIZE FOR POLITICAL LITERATURE (Austria). STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR won the HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE, BRITISH BOOK AWARDS.
CATHERINE THE GREAT AND POTEMKIN was shortlisted for the SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE. His books are published in over 40 languages.
Simon Sebag Montefiore read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy.
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