Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

{{Short description|Non-fiction book by Simon Sebag Montefiore}}

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| name = Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

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| author = Simon Sebag Montefiore

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| language = English

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| subject = History of the Soviet Union

| genre = Popular history

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| publisher = Phoenix

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| pub_date = 2003

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| isbn = 9781842127261

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Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a 2003 popular history{{sfn|Fitzpatrick|2015|p=271}} book by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It focuses on the private life of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his closest political associates from the late 1920s through to his death in 1953, covering the period of collectivization, the Moscow show trials, the purges, World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.{{cite news|last=Pipes |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Pipes |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/books/the-fourth-greatest.html|title=The Fourth Greatest|date=April 18, 2004|work=New York Times|access-date=April 24, 2017|url-access=subscription}}{{cite news|url=http://www.economist.com/node/1940218 |title=Blood on the tracks|date=July 26, 2003|newspaper=The Economist|access-date=April 24, 2017}}

The research for the book privileged "letters, telegrams and diaries of [Stalin's] intimate associates" among the newly available archival material.{{citation |last=Service |first=Robert |author-link=Robert Service (historian) |title=A despot and a flirt |work=The Guardian |date=19 July 2003 |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jul/19/featuresreviews.guardianreview2}} It drew in particular on Stalin's papers from the Presidential Archive in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, opened in 1999.{{sfn|Prosser|2004|p=492}} Montefiore also conducted interviews with surviving descendants of Stalin's inner circle in Rostov-on-Don, Georgia and Abkhazia "about what they saw and heard as adolescent members of the Soviet elite".{{cite journal|url=https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2004-05-01/stalin-court-red-tsar-cold-peace-stalin-and-soviet-ruling-circle |title=Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953|date=May–June 2004|journal=Foreign Affairs|last=Legvold |first=Robert |author-link=Robert Legvold |access-date=April 24, 2017}}

The book discusses Stalin's "personal idiosyncrasies", including his tastes in food, footwear, architecture, "literature, music and history"), as well as his family life and mental health, and portrays him as "a man who liked to throw parties, flirt with women, play billiards, dandle babies on his knee and sing the Orthodox hymns of his youth". The Stalin circle is characterised as "macho, hard-drinking, powerful, and famous across the Imperium", as a group of "voluble, violent, and colourful political showmen", "an incestuous family, a web of lifelong friendships and enduring hatreds, shared love affairs, Siberian exiles and Civil War exploits" (p. 14).

Montefiore later wrote the companion piece Young Stalin, published in 2007.