Joseph Stalin was prob­a­bly one of the most mul­ti­fac­eted, con­tro­ver­sial and yet unknown per­sons in the course of the world his­tory. In Jan­u­ary 1943 Time mag­a­zine fea­tured Stalin as the Per­son of the Year, saying:

The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russ­ian, whose few words of Eng­lish include the Amer­i­can expres­sion “tough guy” was the man of 1942. Only Joseph Stalin fully knew how close Rus­sia stood to defeat in 1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Rus­sia through.

When he began climb­ing the power lad­der (which hap­pened shortly after the first World War and the Russ­ian Civil War), the coun­try was in a state close to anar­chy: the rul­ing gov­ern­ments kept chang­ing, one’s life had very lit­tle value and there was no guar­an­tee of Human Rights of any kind. Maybe that is why he had no choice but to impose his new rules: tough and cruel, yet clear to fol­low and, in all hon­esty, viable due to the promised harsh pun­ish­ments — which he was not slow to deliver.It is fair to say that the options he had were not “A free coun­try or total­i­tar­i­an­ism”, no. What he faced was more like “A total anar­chy and chaos — or total­i­tar­i­an­ism”. Need­less to say, the dif­fer­ence is palpable.

Now it is inter­est­ing to note that in 1930s of the 20^th cen­tury there were very few coun­tries in Europe which did not lean toward total­i­tar­i­an­ism (apart from France or Eng­land, per­haps). The mod­ern his­to­ri­ans now say that Stalin was some­what of a Hitler’s fol­lower, and this point of view is cer­tainly worth weight­ing. For instance, the Great Purge –the mass polit­i­cal repres­sions and his own per­sonal crimes against the human­ity — is now said to start on the 1^st  Decem­ber 1934, with the assas­si­na­tion of Sergey Kirov, the leader of the oppo­si­tion move­ment — which hap­pened not long after the Ger­man “Night of the Long Knives” (30 June 1933). Stalin fig­ured that that was a very effi­cient way to elim­i­nate the crit­ics of his regime and to bring the allies to order — so he did not con­tem­plate the mas­sacre as he saw it fit. The main dif­fer­ence to Hitler’s approach was, how­ever, that Hitler made it to the top in a legit­i­mate and civil way, whereas Stalin had formed a gang from a  good for noth­ing bunch and had to con­trol them in a very vio­lent way. Sadly, there was a young coun­try which suf­fered the most.

The point of all of this cru­elty was that Stalin cre­ated indeed a very capa­ble and effec­tive sys­tem, which could only per­form well under his own per­sonal rule. So with his death in 1953 the sys­tem began to shat­ter and then even­tu­ally fell apart show­ing the imper­fec­tions of total­i­tar­i­an­ism as a whole.  But the Churchill’s notion on  “Stalin who took the coun­try  with a hoe and left it with the atomic bomb” is not really very truth­ful. Nev­er­the­less, Stalin’s per­sona has become some­what of a myth­i­cal deity: still, about a half of those of the Russ­ian ori­gin would con­sider him the hero who rebuilt the coun­try after the WWII, who kept every­thing in order and ene­mies at bay, and who just saved the coun­try and its people.

Fun­nily enough, it is vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to find any of the old pho­tographs of Stalin among the peo­ple. When you start look­ing, you get pho­tos with Churchill and Roo­sevelt on the Yalta con­fer­ence; you get Stalin on gov­ern­ment meet­ings or in Mau­soleum, you get Stalin mak­ing  a speech for the Com­mu­nist Party. The images of Stalin among the fac­tory work­ers are very rare  — just like Stalin vis­it­ing a min­ing plant or army bar­racks. So he wasn’t that close to peo­ple, after all — quite the con­trary, he tried to stay as far away from the reg­u­lar peo­ple as pos­si­ble: he never trav­elled to Siberia or the Urals, and when he did leave his Moscow  res­i­dence (like when vis­it­ing Tehran), the whole voy­age was top rank classified.

Cer­tainly there is an array of opin­ions on Stalin, but there is one I find par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing, by some­one named S. Montefiore:

Stalin pos­sessed a rare com­bi­na­tion of being intel­lec­tual and mur­der­ous at the same time. He did well at school, he wrote poetry, he aspired to a lot, but he was dif­fer­ent: he was never an ide­al­ist. At school he picked up what was nec­es­sary to suc­ceed in those unsta­ble times: the basics of espi­onage,  black­mail, human hunt, vio­lence and no account for feel­ings or emo­tions. He could have not suc­ceeded else­where, apart from in those times, in those places. But back in the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Rus­sia, sur­rounded by the cruel and unscrupu­lous peo­ple, he man­aged to become the most cruel and the most unscrupulous.

Stalin’s per­son­al­ity has been under scrutiny for the past 60 or 70 years, not only by his­to­ri­ans, but also by psy­chol­o­gists and  lin­guists. Fun­nily enough, they now find his rhetoric to be of a prim­i­tive level, but his pub­lic speak­ing skills were excel­lent. L. Batkin, for instance, argues that Stalin had a ten­dency to keep repeat­ing what was being said by twist­ing and turn­ing the same idea around– tau­tol­ogy was his main speak­ing tech­nique. His vocab­u­lary was said to be poor  but he was always pompous: this was his way to con­ceal that he did not have much to say. His log­i­cal  rea­son­ing was also poor: often he con­structed his per­sua­sive chains by say­ing some­thing like A is A, and B is B, hence it is not pos­si­ble because it just can’t be. The true hor­ror of it is that it never really mattered:he was already there, at the top, before any­body could notice.

Almost a decade after his death, a poem by a promi­nent Russ­ian dis­si­dent Evgeniy Evtushenko was pub­lished. The poem describes the bur­ial of Stalin but at the end sug­gests that the prob­lems are not yet over.

Grimly clench­ing his embalmed fists, just pre­tend­ing to be dead, he watched from inside. He was schem­ing. Had merely dozed off. And I, appeal­ing to our gov­ern­ment, peti­tion them to dou­ble, and tre­ble, the sen­tries guard­ing the slab, and stop Stalin from ever ris­ing again.

Related posts:

1. Moscow Under­ground With­out Stalin  —  See the Gaps
2. Happy Birth­day Dear USSR! The Great Octo­ber Social­ist Rev­o­lu­tion. Novem­ber 7^th 1917.
3. Queues
4. The Great Patri­otic War: the Vil­lain­ous Hitler’s Plan or the Provoсation?
5. Sign­boards of Soviet Stores