Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

How could we so blindly trust this band of scoundrels?”

How indeed.

Speak the truth, like a Bolshevik.”

“My journey and its results were a great victory for us.” On the flight back to Moscow, Molotov’s plane was attacked by enemy fighters and then by Russian ones.1

When Mekhlis learned that an arsenal of German pornography had been captured, he immediately launched a new front against Nazi erotica, writing a leaflet called “How Hitler Corrupts His Army.”

His advisers suggested that pornography was natural in a bourgeois army and their nocturnal reading habits were not dictated by Hitler personally, but Mekhlis ignored them and printed eleven million copies of this much mocked document.

“The Gloomy Demon” exposed Kulik’s hedonistic junket involving his own DC-3 plane, barrels of wine and vodka, a missing 85,898 roubles and the Marshal’s new teenage wife.

Whoa.

Then Stalin peered grumpily out at the village which he immediately noticed was teeming with ill-concealed Chekists: he asked how many there were, but the NKVD tried to conceal the real number. When Stalin exploded, they admitted there was an entire division. Indeed, the generals noticed that the village itself had been completely emptied: there was no one except the NKVD for miles around.

As he told Chou at a later meeting, in a phrase that illustrates Stalin’s entire monstrous career, the North Koreans could keep on fighting indefinitely because they “lose nothing, except for their men.”4

Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags. Yet, after so much slaughter, they were still believers.

“But you Western capitalists have killed many more in Russia with your AIDS than Stalin ever did!”