Simon Sebag Montefiore: When Stalin no longer ruled by charm

From a discussion at the Policy Exchange by the author of 'Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar'

Stalin did not rise to power using fear: on the contrary, Stalin used charm - and his charm was almost irresistible. If anything, he was what the Americans call a people person. When he moved one comrade to Moscow, the visitor said he liked Stalin's flat. Stalin gave it to him. I was amazed to find lists in his handwriting saying which family was to have which car, dividing up the Buicks and Packards of the Kremlin garage. When Beria moved to Moscow, Stalin inspected his flat, decided it was not big enough, chose an aristocratic mansion and arrived to check the heating was working.

He supervised the gift to all the leaders of US refrigerators and later the first televisions. He told jokes, sang songs, held dinners and called his friends by nicknames. Even as late as 1934, Stalin was not yet dictator. I found letters in which he constantly had to apologise to his men for telling them off or not appreciating them enough. Stalin's colleagues and circle were not afraid of him in the early Thirties. Of course, they knew he prided himself on his ruthlessness but so did all Bolsheviks. Yet it did not occur to them that he would turn his ruthlessness on the group of comrades who had known him almost 30 years. We know that in the terror of 1937, Stalin would kill many of his comrades - but, of course, they did not.

One of the most revealing details about Stalin's court in the 1930s concerned Alexander Svanidze, the brother of his first wife (who died in 1907) and was one of his dearest friends in the mid-1930s. Stalin invited Svanidze and his opera-singer wife to dinner in 1935 and they actually forgot to turn up. They arrived two hours late - and found Stalin angrily playing snooker with his guards.

This must have outraged Stalin's sense of his uniqueness, his separateness, his Messianic egotism. It must have contributed to his feeling that the ruling elite were too insubordinate, soft, decadent, overfamiliar, overprivileged: the terror would correct these failings. The Svanidzes were shot. And after the terror of 1937, Stalin no longer ruled by charm. No one was ever late for dinner ever again.

'Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar' by Simon Sebag Montefiore is published By Weidenfeld & Nicholson