My Affair With Stalin

Simon Sebag Montefiore

There's a long tradition of novels set in old-fashioned boarding schools. But there can be few as outragious in their conception (or as enjoyable) as My Affair With Stalin. The basic idea is this: our narrator hero Cabbage Conroy (in this particular school cabbage=poor at sport) decides that the school weaklings have had enough of their teasing and bullying and will rise up and overthrow their tormentors. October 1917. And by means of a couple of lucky breaks and ruthless application of Stalinist principles this is achieved. Juxtaposed throughout the book are the feuding gangs of a minor boys' public school and the most monstrous system of government the world has ever seen. In between chapters titled "The Congress of Victors 1934" and "The Destruction of Trotsky 1924-8" are others such as "Stalin Plays Rugby" and "Stalin's Pornographic Collection". It's great fun.

At my own little school in 1983 one of my fellow pupils came up with a similar wheeze and registered "The Nazi Party" alongside the boring "Conservatives" and "Labour" candidates in the school's mock election. There were Hitlerite posters in the staffroom (cleverly done in art class) and all sorts of other mischief. So the daft humour of My Affair With Stalin, with its cast of teenage boys messing contentedly with imagery they sense is powerful but of which they understand nothing, is, I think, perfectly judged. In the end our teachers put a stop to the Nazi Party on the (in retrospect appallingly inadequate) grounds that the papers could get hold of the story and make it seem as if there were sinister neo-fascist cells in public schools all across Wiltshire (there weren't). Fee-paying schools are so sensitive to bad PR.

Somewhat bizarrely Simon Sebag Montefiore has also since written a serious book about Stalin and this seems to have buried My Affair... deep in his back catalogue. And every time he is wheeled onto the radio or TV to talk about Stalinist Russia I itch for the interviewer to finish with "and what about Stalin's pornographic collection?" and it never happens. Which is a pity.