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I shall bring him forth and shine on him the pitiless light of history.
Stalin was a monster, one of the outstanding monsters civilization has yet produced.
No dictator of the twentieth century, from Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung to minor tyrants like Kim Il Sung, Castro, Perón, Mengistu, Saddam Hussein, Ceauşescu, and Qaddaffi, was without distinctive echoes of the Napoleonic prototype.
His favorite phrase was “the all-hiding darkness of the forest.”
He particularly hated Poles, even more than Jews. He believed them to be the mortal and irreconcilable enemies of Russia and would gladly have exterminated the entire population, an attitude he shared with Hitler.
He had probably read more Lenin than Marx, for he never read Das Kapital in its entirety. (Who has, apart from Isaac Deutscher?)
Stalin was well aware of the power conferred on anyone in a totalitarian dictatorship who had knowledge of such secret phone numbers, and he used it constantly, especially on the various occasions when he carried out major purges and destroyed the head of the secret police.
It is impossible to push through a revolution without killing people. Preferably by shooting, it is quickest.”
a “man of action,” as he put it, as opposed to a “tea drinker.”
The entire apparatus of the Soviet tyranny, as it was to exist for over three-quarters of a century—secret police, trial in secret without law, prisons and concentration camps, mass killing—was in existence while Lenin was in power, long before Stalin got his hands on it.
“This cook can only serve up peppery dishes.”
“I know that one cannot be right against the party. One can only be right with the party and through the party, since history has created no other paths to the grasping of what is right.”
In 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.
A detailed calculation reveals more than ten million men, women, and children met unnatural deaths, chiefly starvation, in the years 1929 to 1936.
It was a case of “death solves the problem,” to use his favorite maxim.
Stalinist monikers: the Man of Steel, the Brass-Hard Leninist, the Granite Genius, the Universal Mind, the Iron Soldier, the Diamond-Hard Thruster, and the Human Steam-Hammer, to mention only a few.
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.
Stalin liked to stage an antiphonal exchange, reminiscent of the liturgies of his seminary youth, in which he posed as a moderate, bending to the will of more resolute avengers.
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.
After 1937 he had no friends, though he had cronies.
“It was then that my father’s whole life stood out before me as a rejection of Wisdom and of Goodness, in the name of ambition, as a complete giving of oneself to Evil. I saw how slowly, day by day, he had been destroyed by evil, and how evil had killed all those who stood near him. He had simply sunk deeper and deeper into the black chasms of the lie, of fury and pride.”
The extent to which Stalin’s admirers in the West, by their gullibility and in some cases deliberate lies, kept him going, and thus prolonged the Terror, has never been calculated.
In November 1928 Stalin ordered the curators of the Leningrad Hermitage (the old tsarist collection) to sell part of its contents immediately to millionaires all over the world. The largest sales went to Andrew W. Mellon, who bought twenty-one paintings, including a Van Eyck, a Rubens, five Rembrandts, four Van Dycks, two Raphaels, a Titian, a Velázquez, and a Botticelli, plus others, for a total of $6,654,053 in cash, a third of all Soviet exports to the USA in the year.
They invented, originally for use against tanks, a homemade petrol hand grenade, ironically baptized a Molotov cocktail, which destroyed hundreds of tanks and became a world-famous weapon.
Blokhin, who normally lived in the inner prison at the Lubyanka, where he was officially in charge with the rank of major-general, arrived in Poland at the Ostashkov Camp near the Katyn Forest. A specially built soundproof hut was built for him and his two assistants, the brothers Vasily and Ivan Zhigarev. To protect his uniform from the blood, he wore a leather butcher’s apron and a cap, and then proceeded to shoot Poles in the back of the head at the steady rate of 250 a night, for a month of nights—probably committing more individual killings than any other man in history.
Their diversion to Russia sealed Singapore’s fate. (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.)
Yalta, a seaside resort virtually cleared of its normal inhabitants for the occasion; Churchill called it “the Riviera of Hell.”
Insecurity was inseparable from the nature of Russia’s political structure. Russia has always been an autocracy, that is, a state (as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary) ruled by a single person “of uncontrolled authority, an absolute, irresponsible governor, one who rules with undisputed sway.” The key words are “uncontrolled” and “irresponsible.”
But the constitutions were nugatory. So far as the exercise of power at the top was concerned, they existed only on paper.
The tsar tended to live in a prison of superstition.
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.
“If I see a door ajar, I push on it to see how far it will open, and if it opens wide I go through it.”
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.
“Ignoble spies and killers under the masks of professor-doctors,”
