## We now know how he talked (constantly about himself, often with revealing honesty), how he wrote notes and letters, what he ate, sang and read. Placed in the context of the fissiparous Bolshevik leadership, a unique environment, he becomes a real person.
## The man inside was a super-intelligent and gifted politician for whom his own historic role was paramount, a nervy intellectual who manically read history and literature, a fidgety hypochondriac suffering from chronic tonsillitis, psoriasis, rheumatic aches from his deformed arm and the iciness of his Siberian exile.
## Garrulous, sociable and a fine singer, this lonely and unhappy man ruined every love relationship and friendship in his life by sacrificing happiness to political necessity and cannibalistic paranoia.
## Damaged by his childhood and abnormally cold in temperament, he tried to be a loving father and husband yet poisoned every emotional well, this nostalgic lover of roses and mimosas who believed the solution to every human problem was death, and who was obsessed with executions.
## This atheist owed everything to priests and saw the world in terms of sin and repentance, yet he was a ‘convinced Marxist fanatic from his youth’.
## His fanaticism was ‘semi-Islamic’, his Messianic egotism boundless.
## He assumed the imperial mission of the Russians yet remained very much a Georgian, bringing the vendettas of his forefathers northwards to Muscovy.
from 'Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar' by Simon Sebag Montefiore https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZDH10A/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_hE-DAbG1GT00B