Confessions of the Kremlin henchmen

This is an extraordinary book, and Simon Sebag Montefiore might well be one of the very few people who could possibly have written it. By that, I mean that the research and the writing required not only the skills of a journalist and the patience of a historian, but also the ear of a gossip columnist and the talents of a seasoned party-goer - qualities not often found combined in one person.

Only an unusually creative mind (and only someone who could have got Mick Jagger to write favourably of his previous book, on the 18th century Russian statesman, Potemkin) could have seen through the grey facade of Stalin's entourage, and found, behind all of those leaden photographs of leaders standing to attention in Red Square, a debauched, intrigue-filled, scandal-laden world, populated by star-crossed lovers, wicked rapists, spoiled children and men who murdered their best friends.

There will, I am certain, be historians who dislike this book, who pick apart Sebag Montefiore's assumptions or who question the recollections of some of the people he interviewed. But they will never be able to deny his basic achievement.

Not only has he combed through archives, uncovering not just state papers but billetsdoux, postcards, and other personal notes, he has managed to persuade a whole generation of little old ladies and elderly men - the wives, daughters, granddaughters, servants, nieces and nephews of Stalin's henchmen - to give him a series of extraordinary interviews and, in some cases, lend him their hand-written memoirs.

The Zhdanov family - relatives of Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin's court favourites - even let him listen to a tape made, decades ago, of one of the Politburo's music sessions, featuring General Voroshilov on vocals and Zhdanov on piano: "There one can actually hear the fine voices and tinkling piano of a night at Kuntsevo," Stalin's dacha, writes Sebag Montefiore.

Why so few have thought to search out these people before is unclear. Perhaps his interest in real people, as opposed to historical caricatures, led him in this direction.

And his research has produced what will have to be seen as genuinely new portraits of Soviet leaders. Thanks in part to his interview with Martha Peshkova - granddaughter of the writer Maxim Gorky and childhood friend of Svetlana Stalin - we have, for example, a full portrait of the private life of one of the 20th century's great criminals.

For Peshkova married Sergo Beria, son of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's chief of secret police in the 1940s, a time when Stalin's concentration camps and jails were at their fullest. Not only does she describe Beria playing volleyball on the weekends, she tells of how he once amazed her by pointing at her daughter - his grand-daughter - and announcing that she would "be tutored at home, and then she's going to Oxford University", not a very Communist sentiment.

That certainly puts a new twist on Beria's end: he was put to death after Stalin died, having been accused, falsely, of being a British spy.

But there was another, distinctly less attractive side to Beria, too. Others have written of his violent womanising, but Sebag Montefiore compiles the details: the rape of Soviet film star Tatiana Okunevskaya, the cruises through Moscow to pick up women, the town houses where he wined and dined women before attacking them - "Scream or not, it doesn't matter," he told Okunevskaya - and the arranged abortions.