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Terror was part of the DNA of the Communist Party; autocracy was part of the DNA of the Russian state; and killing was Stalin’s essential political tool but also part of a personality shaped by his underground life, the savagery of the civil war and, above all, by the experience of power and insecurity in the Kremlin. Dictatorship makes its own monsters.
The bizarre mayhem of the Terror was the creation of all of these, driven by Stalin’s ferocious darkness, implacable will, political skill and his cool but totally reckless violence. No great power has ever mutilated itself in such an extraordinary frenzy of chaos and murder. Suspicious
in the ‘national operations’, Poles and Koreans were decimated; within the republics, the terror hit Ukrainians most intensely. The vindictive torture of old enemies, the killing of friends and families and the paranoid scenarios of lurid conspiracies all reflected the strangeness of Stalin himself, but he believed that terror was the only way to ensure total loyalty.
During his reign, eighteen million innocents passed through the atrocious GULAG camps.
The total killed during Stalin’s rule will never be known but it was probably close to twenty million.
‘Once in the days of yore you heard the voice of a man,’ Hitler told the rally in September 1936, ‘and…it awakened you, and you followed it…When we meet here we are suffused with wonder at our coming together. Not all of you can see me, and I can’t see all of you. But I can feel you, and you can feel me.’
‘The Duce will have Ethiopia,’ said Graziani, ‘with or without the Ethiopians.’
In Vienna,
an elegant Englishwoman named Clarice Sebag-Montefiore, heard from her lover in the Foreign Ministry that the Nazis already had a list of Jews to arrest.
Ion Antonescu,
‘Send your source to fuck his mother,’ he wrote on one report. Stalin could be as mulishly obtuse as he was lupinely astute and felinely flexible. ‘An intelligence officer,’ he said, ‘ought to be like the devil, believing no one, not even himself.’ In this case, the devil out-devilled himself. He knew that Hitler was his enemy and that war would come but believed the pact would delay it until 1943. As tension rose, he should have probed an alliance with Britain. His mistake was to regard Hitler as a conventional statesman, while in fact the Führer was the self-declared ‘sleepwalker’ who sought
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‘Lenin left a state and we’ve fucked it up,’ said Stalin, returning to his mansion for two days to collect himself and, like Ivan the Terrible, test the loyalty of his boyars. On the third, his grandees arrived to insist that he take command. The Georgian ex-choirboy who, like Hitler, believed he was a born soldier, assumed the title Supremo and, mustering Russia’s unparalleled resources of human and industrial power, fielding an awesome 4.2 million troops, rallied his own people with a mix of patriotism, terror and Marxism to engage Hitler in a ‘life-and-death struggle’.
Nazi invaders instantly started to murder large numbers: out of 5.7 million PoWs, 3 million were starved, the greatest crime of the war after the killing of European Jews. ‘I’m approaching this matter ice-coldly,’ Hitler said. ‘I feel myself to be but the executioner of the will of history. Once we are the lords of Europe, we will hold the dominant position in the world.’
In an astonishing conversation, Hirohito, now forty-four, and his commanders decided to risk everything rather than give up any of their expansionist ambitions. ‘If we open hostilities,’ asked Hirohito, ‘will our operations have a probability of success?’ ‘Yes,’ answered General Hajime Sugiyama, his chief of staff. ‘At the time of the China Incident [invasion] the army told me we’d achieve peace after one blow. Sugiyama, you were army minister then.’ ‘We met unexpected difficulties…’ ‘Didn’t I caution you?’ asked Hirohito. ‘Are you lying to me, Sugiyama?’ ‘Your Majesty?’ asked naval chief
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Razor checked with Hitler whether he would join the war against the USA. Hitler had no obligation but America was ‘a mongrel society’ of Jews, black people and Slavs that ‘couldn’t possibly create an indigenous culture or operate a successful political system’.
In spring 1939, Hitler had ordered the liquidation of the elderly, the mentally ill and the deformed to ensure ‘survival of the fittest’. Hitler had often talked at dinners of his plan ‘to eradicate the incurably ill and not just the mentally ill’. He commissioned his personal doctor Karl Brandt and a Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Major Genetic Disease and Suffering, made up of radicalized doctors, to create a secret system denoted T4 (Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin – headquarters of the euthanasia programme). In September 1939 Hitler ordered ‘mercy killings of ill people
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an astonishing resistance encouraged by terror but truly inspired by the quasi-sacred cults of patriotism, sacrifice and heroism. ‘Za Rodina, za Stalina!’ they cried as they fought. ‘For Motherland, for Stalin!’ Soviet losses in the entire war were unparalleled: twelve million soldiers and over fifteen million civilians perished.
In Germany alone, an estimated two million girls were raped by Russian soldiers.[*32]
The three men were masters of a new world, although none yet understood that their dominion would be overshadowed by a new force. On 17 July, Truman learned that a baby had been born: ‘Doctor has just returned most enthusiastically and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother.’ But it was not a baby: it was a bomb.
The day before, 16 July 1945, as he watched the mushroom cloud of Operation Trinity, the exhilarated director of the secret Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoted the Bhagavad Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.’ But the ‘splendor’ had a fearsome power: ‘I am become Death, destroyer
of worlds.’
Antisemitism became morally unacceptable; the Enlightenment was restored.
A country eight years old was getting the Bomb, developed at Dimona in the Negev. Peres never admitted that Israel had the Bomb. ‘War and peace are always a dance of the mysteries,’ he told this author, but it changed the balance of power in west Asia.
Khrushchev realized that Mao was like Stalin: ‘They were the same.’ Human life meant nothing.
On 14 July 1958, the night before King Faisal’s wedding, officers led by Abd al-Karim Qasim stormed the Rihab Palace. Faisal surrendered but was forced with his aunt, uncle and mother to stand in the courtyard, where they were machine-gunned down. ‘All I did was remember Palestine,’ said one of the assassins, ‘and the trigger on the machine gun just set itself off.’ The bodies were dragged down al-Rashid Street, stripped, mutilated, beheaded, stomped on, dismembered, gutted and dangled from balconies before being burned.
‘How can one govern a country,’ he said, ‘that has 258 cheeses?’
force de frappe. His priority
On her fourth day in the White House, Mimi was invited by the First Friend and presidential procurer Dave Powers to a swimming party, which led to cocktails and then to a euphemistic invitation: ‘Would you like a tour of the residence, Mimi?’ A tour of the residence usually included a tour of JFK. Mimi ‘cannot describe what happened that night as making love’ – she called him ‘Mister President’ even when naked in Jackie’s bed – but it was ‘sexual, intimate, passionate’, and later he introduced amyl nitrite poppers into their assignations. JFK displayed his nastier side when, at the White House
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Mandela deployed steely discipline and daily meditation to survive, writing to Winnie that prison was ‘an ideal place to learn to know yourself…At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good,’ adding, ‘Never forget a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.’
On 26 July 1962, a Soviet armada departed from Odessa bearing 44,000 troops and six atomic bombs, along with eighteen nuclear cruise missiles, three divisions of tactical nuclear weapons and six bombers. In August they started installing the missiles: it is likely Khrushchev permitted his commander to use the tactical weapons – if necessary. American intelligence noticed activity in Cuba but had missed massive activity in Odessa and never realized the full extent of the Soviet deployment.[*13]
On 14 October, a US spy plane revealed some of the missiles in Cuba, throwing JFK into an existential world crisis. He had found the hedgehog in his pants. ‘He can’t do this to me,’ he said, calling Khrushchev ‘a fucking liar’, an ‘immoral gangster’. It was the biggest crisis any president would face, and ultimately he proved his acumen, telling his Executive Committee, ‘Gentlemen, we’re going to earn our pay today.’
While Khrushchev was calming down, Kennedy sent Jackie and the children out of Washington and raised DEFCON (Defence Readiness Condition) to Level 2,[*14] just short of war, a move that so alarmed Khrushchev that he told Mikoyan he was withdrawing the missiles in return for ‘promises the Americans won’t attack Cuba’.
Khrushchev had been reading translations of articles by the powerful Washington Post columnist Walter Lippman, who had suggested a solution: removal of American missiles from Türkiye in return for removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. No journalist in history has ever been so influential. With this idea, Khrushchev sent a second less conciliatory letter to JFK, who dispatched his brother to discuss the plan with the Soviet ambassador. As the president relaxed somewhat, Special Assistant Dave Powers summoned his teenage lover, the intern Mimi. Yet though he chatted to her, JFK’s ‘expression was
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‘the imperialists might initiate a nuclear strike against the USSR’, suggested Fidel, so the ‘moment would be right’ to launch nuclear strikes on America. ‘However difficult and horrifying this decision may be, there is I believe no other recourse.’ It remains the most terrifying letter ever written by a leader. Khrushchev was horrified: ‘When this was read to us, we, sitting in silence, looked at one another for a long time.’
Yet the officers of B-59 had had no contact with Moscow and only knew of negotiations from American radio. Around midday on 27 October, Captain Savitsky, believing the two superpowers were at war, ordered the launch of a T5 nuclear missile: ‘Prepare [nuclear] torpedo tube 1 and 2 for firing!’ But his commander, Akhipov, using the sub as a command centre, overruled him and convinced him to surface, where an American ship flashed its searchlights in a friendly gesture. Savitsky understood and ordered: ‘Stop preparations for firing.’ It was the closest the world came to nuclear war.
Khrushchev denounced the Cuban: ‘Because he’s young, he couldn’t behave himself.’ But the crisis had shown, he said, ‘we are members of the World Club’ and defended himself: ‘It’s not necessary to act like the tsarist officer who farted at the ball and then shot himself.’ It had been a bit more than a fart at a ball. ‘I cut his balls off,’ exulted JFK, who resumed the affair with Mimi. Kennedy and Khrushchev, who had terrified each other, hinted through aides that it was time to reduce nuclear weapons and agreed to establish a hotline – actually a teleprinter – to avoid future crises. Each
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In Dallas, on 22 November 1963, JFK, riding in an open limousine with Jackie, chic personified in a pink Chanel suit, was shot in the skull and throat by an assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, probably operating alone. As sections of his brain spattered her suit, Jackie crawled out of the back of the limousine and was rescued by a bodyguard as the convoy sped to the hospital, where the president was declared dead. His successor Lyndon Johnson, a Brobdingnagian tough, self-made Texan machine-politician and congressional maestro who had hated the vice-presidency (‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’, said
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Khrushchev sent Mikoyan, who had been a bearer of Lenin’s coffin in 1924, to Kennedy’s funeral.
‘Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race,’ promised LBJ, ‘until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.’
Yet his decency was always infected with oafish pragmatism: ‘I’ll have those n*****s voting Democrat for the next 200 years.’
The dictator who believes his own myth will be consumed by it.
The discovery confirmed that DNA itself was the carrier of hereditary information, and further study showed that humans were virtually all the same; differences were tiny and everyone was a walking collection of family histories and a member of a deeper, broader family.
In 1960, a birth-control pill, using hormones to inhibit ovulation, freed women from male control of sex for the first time: it could be enjoyed for its own sake. New household gadgets, washing machines, fridges, vacuum cleaners, made female servants obsolete, but also liberated women – encouraged by a movement of female empowerment, feminism – to pursue independent careers. They had fewer children, but now most of those survived to adulthood, leading to a new cult of childhood, particularly in the middle class, where the desire for women to work clashed with the virtues of attentive
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As for America, Brezhnev thought it was ‘a sick society’ where ‘gangsterism, racism and drug addiction have reached enormous proportions. The monopolies are robbing the people, having grabbed political power.’
As 50,000 starved, the negus denied the famine: ‘Everything is under control.’
Equatorial Guinea
Their arrogance led to abuse: fortunes were made in property development; 140,000 were arrested including 40,000 Sikhs; the same fate befell all opposition leaders. Sanjay oversaw a sterilization campaign to reduce the population: 8.3 million men underwent vasectomies, some of them by force, with the result that many died of infections.
Lisbon: in April 1974, a cabal of captains, weary of domestic oppression and African wars, seized power. Their Carnation Revolution, establishing democracy in Portugal, ended five centuries of empire and thirteen years of colonial wars – but accelerated a bloody scramble for Angola.
‘Few times in history,’ boasted Castro, who flew in to visit the front, ‘has a war – the most terrible heart-rending human action imaginable – been accompanied by such a degree of humanity on the part of the victors.’ Cuban troops, he added, were there for fifteen years. As late as spring 1988, some 40,000 Cuban, Communist Angolan and Namibian troops defeated Angolan rebels and their South African allies at Cuito Cuanavale, the largest modern battle in African history. Over 300,000 Cuban troops served in the country.
Abroad, Andropov disdained the corruption and weakness of western democracies and pursued sophisticated programmes of disinformation that are the real origins of today’s ‘fake news’.
