Hint: Read the prologue. It’s good.
Here’s a fact that belongs on a motivational poster in hell: the Tsar’s police kept catching Joseph Stalin, kept shipping him to Siberia, and kept watching him stroll right back to town. Montefiore — whose books are so dense with delicious factoids you could power a small grid — counts the man escaping exile again and again, five times in total, because Tsarist exile was, to him, a joke. You got a state allowance of eight roubles a month. You rented a room, your exile limited only to geography. Lenin and Trotsky basically went glamping, escaping administrative punishment by simply posing as someone else. On Stalin’s sixth exile, he learned that being sent deep into the Arctic conferred less escape success.
So when the same man later built a prison empire, he was working from his own one-star reviews of the previous management. His scorn for Tsarist “toothlessness” was bottomless — and the gulag was the fix. Camps eight time zones from Moscow, ringed by thousands of miles of frozen nothing, where the few who fled simply died in the wild. The system that produced a revolutionary, redesigned so no similar-minded successor could ever repeat the trick.
This review is on helium compared to its subject — but Montefiore’s portrait, urchin to choirboy to pirate to killer, is irresistibly good reading. (P.S. all his other books are awesome, too!)
