Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer (Icons)

by Paul Johnson

Stalin was a monster, one of the outstanding monsters civilization has yet produced.

He read Marx, and this was the beginning of a lifelong faith in Marxism, which for Stalin was always a fervently held substitute for religion.

But with a few notable exceptions, he never killed anybody himself.

it is a fact that the main recruiting ground for the more violent Social Democrats was among the persecuted minorities: Jews, Poles, Armenians, Georgians, and other distinctive groups formed the majority of the Bolsheviks.

Lenin, by now head of the Bolshevik faction, recognized Stalin could be useful to the party, and admired what he recognized as a profound streak of violence.

Stalin disliked political wives, and had at least four of his colleagues’ shot.

Unable to stand the horrors of Stalin’s life as head of a regime that killed its opponents systematically, she shot herself in 1932, having given Stalin two children,

His instinctive hatred of Trotsky, whom he loathed from their first meeting in 1904, was anti-Semitic.

Stalin himself was a master of disguise, which he often needed, but he never shaved off his moustache, which he first grew in 1900 and wore for the rest of his life.

He believed it made him attractive to women.

Illegitimate offspring who demanded privileges might well end up in the gulag, even if they escaped shooting.

People in the revolutionary movement saw him as an exotic figure, all the more fascinating because he was also known as a ruthless gunman and (some suspected) killer.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Stalin ruled by phone, but it was probably the single most important weapon in his armory of control.

Stalin’s favorite activity was work. He spent long hours at his desk, going through papers.

Lenin vetoed it, saying, “Absolute nonsense. It is impossible to push through a revolution without killing people. Preferably by shooting, it is quickest.”

He regarded Stalin as a reliable, useful man, a “man of action,” as he put it, as opposed to a “tea drinker.”

“These were problem men, and death solves the problem. No men, no problem.” (This became one of his favorite sayings.)

“Stalin is too rude and this becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the Comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint someone more patient, polite and attentive.”

the last peacetime years of the tsars, Russia had the fastest-growing industrial economy in the world; the First World War, the revolution, and the civil war had brought all that to an end.

The scale of the tragedy is almost beyond belief, though today, with the documentary example of the Nazi Holocaust and the “cultural revolution

of Mao Tse-tung, which cost six million and thirty million lives, respectively, before our eyes, we find no difficulty in accepting the enormity of the human losses.

The philosopher Leszek Kołakowski has called it “probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a ...

The result was, according to the historian Robert Conquest, “perhaps the only case in history of a purely man-made famine.”

the 1,225 Communist delegates at the Seventeenth Party Congress of February 1934, 1,108 were arrested within a year. Most of them died under torture in the hands of the NKVD

the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the congress, ninety-eight were arrested and all shot.

Over fourteen months in 1937 and 1938 Stalin had 1.8 million people arrested in forty-two separate and carefully prepared swoops. Nearly 690,000 were killed.

The only rational purpose behind the random procedure was to inspire terror, for it was essential that everyone should be afraid of arrest for no particular reason in order for the terror to be universal and ubiquitous.

Svetlana, believed that the suicide of her mother in 1932, in reaction to the forced collectivization of the peasants and the famine, extinguished the last spark of humanity in her father’s nature, and that thereafter, his principle “death solves all problems” took over.

After 1937 he had no friends, though he had cronies.

Fanciful accounts of these projects were produced by mesmerized and indoctrinated Western writers.

Among the most imaginative of Stalin’s admirers was Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, whose reports were specially translated and read by Stalin, and helped to strengthen his self-respect.

Stalin said of Duranty: “It is thanks to honest and courageous journalists like him that we realize how our work is appreciated abroad.”

He also had a “special contingent” of fifteen thousand “officers, landowners, and politicians,” in addition to more than ten thousand “counter-revolutionary landowners,” who held reserve officer rank. In accordance with his maxim “death solves all problems,”

Stalin decided to kill them all.

While watching this deed he would eat hard-boiled eggs, one by one, carefully removing the shells first. It was a superstition of his that this was a form of food impossible to be poisoned.

Hitler had been persuaded by the poor performance of the Red Army against Finland, and by the consequences of the purge of the Soviet generals, that it would be a comparatively simple matter to destroy the Soviet armed forces in a swift campaign in 1941.

But his clownish Italian ally, Mussolini, embarked on an invasion of Greece, which failed, and obliged Hitler to come to his rescue with a Balkan campaign, forcing him to postpone his invasion of Russia until midnight on June 21. The delay of five weeks was to prove fatal.

Stalin refused to believe reports of the German attack at first and refused to see any members of the politburo except Beria, with whom he continued to discuss measures to arrest and shoot senior Soviet officers.

The winter came a month before Napoleon had to face it in 1812.

(It is an irony of history that Churchill, the last great English imperialist, was prepared to sacrifice Britain’s liberal empire in order to preserve Stalin’s totalitarian one.)

set about the secret deportation of ethnic minorities from western Russia into the interior. The first to go were a million and a half Germans, mostly descended from settlers invited by the empress Catherine the Great.

Ethnic Germans who had lived in Russia for between one and five generations were rounded up and deported from Leningrad and Moscow, while the Nazis were just below the border.

Russian losses had been over twenty-seven million, though how many had been inflicted by the Nazis and how many by Stalin’s own oppressions or wartime social engineering will probably never be known.

Fear, at many different levels, and in many guises, was part of the mechanism of the purges, indeed its central dynamic, for few if any of the various plots and conspiracies had any real substance.

Building on Lenin’s foundations, Stalin created a society in which everyone was afraid. This applied especially to his more powerful colleagues. All of them knew that their lives were perpetually at risk. That was why so many chose to anesthetize the fear by resorting to alcohol. If the evil empire was an empire of fear, a paranoid state, it was also a mental hospital where Nurse Vodka was Queen of the War.

In the last decade of his life, a quarter of a million people were involved in ensuring Stalin’s safety.

They were rival poets, and Mao thought Stalin’s poetry, some of which he had taken the trouble to obtain and read, was “rubbish.”

Above all, Mao was several inches taller than Stalin, and this was a bitter pill to swallow, since Stalin often referred to Asians as “tiny.”

On the other hand, he played a major role in the creation of Israel. His motive was geopolitical, not racial. He believed the Jewish state would be socialist and would play a decisive part in helping to hustle Britain out of the Middle East.