Still, it was not the charm but the ‘deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness’ that were most evident. The first volume of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004), dealing with his life and milieu in power, granted him a certain charisma and even had a chapter headed ‘The Charmer’. Later biographies followed this up the theme of high intelligence and intellectual achievement was particularly prominent in Robert Service’s biography of 2004. In his 1988 biography, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, the first to be based on archival research, Dmitri Volkogonov presented both a real person, capable of emotional reactions and contradictions, and, more surprisingly, a real intellectual who remained a serious, wide-ranging reader all his life. This started to change around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives. The consensus was that in the line-up of totalitarian dictators, Hitler was the one with charisma. As for physical attributes, his short stature, pockmarked face and damaged arm were frequently noted.

Scholars who had to wade through the turgid prose of his theoretical writings concluded that Stalin was poorly educated and probably not too bright, except as a backroom organiser. But the ‘grey blur’ remained, no doubt partly in reaction against devotional Soviet characterisations of the Great Leader, Teacher and Father of Peoples. There was one notable exception among the scholars: Robert Tucker put a dashing young revolutionary – someone who might have stepped out of the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Weathermen – on the cover of Stalin as Revolutionary (1973). These must be among the most misleading descriptions ever to capture the fancy of generations of historians. Trotsky thought him a faceless ‘creature of the bureaucracy’, even in power. Stalin was a ‘grey blur’ in the opinion of Nikolai Sukhanov, the Menshevik-Internationalist chronicler of the Russian Revolution.

Stalin the court of the red tsar