Robert Conquest
Ed. Oscar Mondadori
pp. 392
If we think of the "terrible" men of history, the name of Adolf Hitler comes to mind.
Yet Hitler said of a man: "He is a beast, but a beast of great dimensions ... he is a demon!"
The man he was talking about was Iosif Vissarionovic Dzugasvili, better known as Stalin!
"Stalin thus gives the impression of a large and rough character, almost clay-like, a golem in which a demonic spark was instilled", Churchill called him "an inhuman man".
Stalin was born on December 21 1879 in Gori, Georgia, by Ekaterina and Vissarion Dzugasvili.
The reading of Stalin's biography struck me!
The author, Robert Conquest, was an official at the Foreign Ministry and English historian.
Of course, I knew the character for reading something in the history books, but I never thought there was someone who, compared to Hitler, surpassed him for cruelty! Stalin was a bloody beast, a demon, a golem, a monster, a yellow-eyed tiger, an inhuman man at the same time and had enormous influence not only on the Soviet Union but on the whole world.
As a boy he won a scholarship to the Tiflis theological seminary. Perhaps the seminary did not leave much in him, it certainly left him his way of speaking, in fact he expressed himself using typical forms of catechesis, for example he often repeated the same phrases over and over, if he considered them to carry important concepts. He also left him something else: perhaps involuntarily, since as a boy he could not bear the atmosphere that permeated the seminary, an atmosphere of petty and continuous suspicion towards everything and everyone. He managed to create the same atmosphere throughout the Russian nation.
In the 1901 Stalin is already a Marxist communist and collaborates with a radical and illegal newspaper in Georgia, "Brdzola" (The struggle). Thus began a period of pilgrimages, incarcerations and exiles in Siberia. During the periods spent in prison or in Siberia he had the opportunity to meet many of those who later helped him to take and keep the power. Of course he continued to write and so he also attracted Lenin's attention.
In the 1912 he began to use the pseudonym Stalin (or steel man), previously he used different names: Koba Ivanovic, Stefin, Kato, Vasilij ...
In the 1917 the revolutionary climate is now mature, although perhaps it was not understood by anyone. The tsar is dismissed and the Petrograd Soviet was established at the end of February. In the same period the provisional Committee of the IV Duma was born. The two organs try to occupy the void left by the fall of the Tsar.
Bolsheviks (including Stalin) and Mensheviks vied for power. Lenin, on the other hand, was in exile in Zurich and continued to write in favor of the socialist revolution.
Stalin's career is very particular and is based on murders, falsehoods and cruelties of various kinds, against individuals but much more often against many, men who belonged to a class, the one that for him at the time was the enemy class, that class that becoming enemy of the people allowed him his ascent.
Mass murder was a pleasure for him.
Stalin, year after year, will rise higher and lower with him the number of victims, who at the end of his life will be millions! He always eliminated the enemies, who had often been those who had helped him to rise higher.
Lenin considered it useful and did not recognize, if not too late, the destructive potential of man. But when he realized his mistake it was too late. Lenin died in the 1924 trying to downsize Stalin, but without success: Stalin was too strong for everyone now. His ability to mask his feelings helped him overcome the period after Lenin's death.
Since then the road was free.
His party companions will end up like his enemies, all of them.
His ability to mask his ferocity deceived not only Lenin but also Churchill, Wells, Huxley, Roosevelt ...
The period of the Second World War and the tricks put in place by Stalin deserve a separate article.
Stalin always acted with coldness and cruelty, in my opinion superior to Hitler.
I read the book with interest, with attention ... and with horror.
One last sentence seems important to me because it describes, once again, Stalin: "When we think of Stalin we think of the scene represented in the painting by Goya Saturno devouring his children ..."
And whoever saw the painting can understand what Conquest meant!
Alessandro Rugolo
