Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s tempting to adapt that and say that historians also often repeat themselves, first as biographers, second as novelists. Having written a book about Stalin’s court, and then a biography of Stalin himself, Simon Montefiore now publishes Sashenka, a novel about the horrors visited by Stalin on one family. Stalin appears here as an unsettling combination of rustic, avuncular warmth (‘his feline, almost oriental face smiling and flushed and still singing a Georgian song’) and ice-cold lunacy.
The novel is divided into three parts. In the first, which takes place between 1916 and 1917 in St Petersburg, Sashenka Zeitlin, the teenaged daughter of a wealthy Jewish financier, is recruited into the Bolshevik party. She is arrested for her activism and pursued by a Tsarist officer, who tries vainly to turn her into an informer, but then sees her party’s dream realised when the old ruling classes are swept aside.
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