Stalin
“His was a low-slung, smallish figure, neither markedly stout nor thin, inclining, if anything, to the latter. The square-cut tunic seemed always a bit too large for him: one sensed an effort to compensate for the slightness of stature. Yet there was also a composed, collected strength, and a certain rough handsomeness, in his features. The teeth were discolored, the mustache scrawny, coarse, and streaked. This, together with the pocked face and yellow eyes, gave him the aspect of an old battle-scarred tiger. In manner – with us simple, quiet, unassuming. There was no striving for effect. His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible: indeed they often were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious facade.” George Kennan
Imagine Hitler ruling for 30 years, that was Stalin. An intellectual psychopath, Stalin recognized Leninism/Bolshevism for what it was, intellectual justification for brutality, theft, repression, and power. Promoting the destruction of all the social institutions that served to keep the people precariously bound in some element of civil reciprocity was cat nip to the bank robber he was, and the murderer he became.
His feral cunning, callousness, and Machiavellian malevolence brought him from poverty in Georgia to absolute ruler of the largest victorious army in history, and the conquest of much of the Eurasian continent.
Some say that Hitler had difficulty murdering those he had known well. Not so Stalin. He had the cherished wife of his personal valet of some many years, Poskrebyshev, taken and executed. They had a young son, who Stalin would sit on his lap, like a grandpa. The loved wife of Foreign Minister Vaicheslav Molotov, one of the signers of the death sentence for 21,000 Polish officers held at Katyn forest, and Stalin’s closest comrade in rule for thirty years, was imprisoned for ‘disloyalty’. (Molotov ‘abstained’ on the vote in the Politburo about her arrest, and then later apologized to Stalin about his ‘error’ in judgment and never again raised the issue of her case) Mrs. Molotov was eventually released – four years later – after Stalin’s death. Molotov never acknowledged that Stalin may have intended her harm. Anastos Mikoyan, another lifelong comrade, (also a signer of the Katyn death sentence), the USSR representative at JFK’s funeral, saw his two sons imprisoned, also only released after Stalin’s death. Genrikh Iagoda, Stalin’s early NKVD secret police chief, was ‘tried’ and then shot, as were his wife, and his sister. Another sister, and both parents, perished in the Gulag.
Stalin’s chief rivals for power, Zinoviev, Kamenov, Bukharin, and Trotsky were all executed for false crimes confessed under torture. Many of their wives, children, and parents were also executed, including a teenage son of Kamenov. For many Bolshevik comrades, their real crime, a monstrous crime against humanity, a crime indeed justifiably punishable by death, was their failure, themselves, to bring to trial and to execute Joseph Stalin.
