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I just finished one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read: “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,” by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. It’s exhausting and exhaustive. I highly recommend that you read it — although you might wait until October. Not to commemorate the murderous October Boskhevik Revolution in Russia, but because it’s the month of Halloween.

In recent years many Soviet records have been opened, as well as Stalin’s papers. So we now have the details of what was obvious to many even when he was alive: He was a monster rivaled only by Hitler and Mao.

After a brief look at Stalin’s early career (covered in the author’s more recent book, “Young Stalin“), we’re plunged into his power struggles in the late 1920s. Basically, he followed in the footsteps of Lenin: he killed, and killed again — and again, and again, and again. Every year sees new “enemies” of socialism that he must exerminate: Kulaks (”rich” peasants who owned a couple of cows), Trotskyites, industrial “wreckers,” the Old Bolsheviks (who had started the revolution with him, Lenin, and Trotsky), Volga Germans, Chechens, Mingrelians, finally Jews in the “Doctors’ Plot” just before he died.

The author avoids the usual details about the ideological differences among Stalin, Trotsky, and others. Who cares any longer about such socialist theoretical piffle — besides Marxist American university professors? Stalin’s evil is highlighted by showing that he was not an alien from another planet, but a real human being. He was highly intelligent, loved his children, was devastated when his wife killed herself (beginning another purge after it), had perfect pitch and a beautiful singing voice, was a decent poet as a young man, and read voraciously.

Famines and purges

In the late 1920s, he sent his top henchmen — Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov — out to starve or imprison peasants who wouldn’t give their grain to the government, or who killed their few cows rather than have them stolen for socialism. He sent the henchmen out again to perpetrate the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, when from 5-7 million were starved to death. Whole towns were wiped out.

In the infamous show trials of the late 1930s, he purged most of the Communist Party leaders. His top secret police bosses, also major torturers, in turn became victims: Yegoda was killed by Yezhov who was killed by Beria who was killed, after Stalin’s death, by his rival Politburo members.

Meanwhile, Stalin and the other magnates took trains from Moscow to their lavish vacation homes in Georgia (Stalin’s place of origin) or the Crimea, passing along the way through towns devastated by famine. Sometimes those on the trains would lift the curtains and see the human devastation.

Nobody was safe from being shot or sent to the Gulag: old friends, relatives, eminent scientists, all were at risk. Almost every day he and his henchmen sat around deciding who would die, then composing lists which had hundreds or even thousands of names on them. All the killers signed their names.

Religion was severely persecuted, especially the Russian Orthodox Church. Uniate Catholic bishops were secretly assassinated. The arts were taken over under the phrase Stalin coined, “engineers of the human soul.”

He had one of the sickest senses of humor ever. When he kills the wife of an assistant, he quips, “Don’t worry. We’ll get you another wife.”

Yet though he killed or imprisoned the wives of many colleagues and relatives, they cringingly went along with the crimes — before, in many cases, falling victim themselves.

Socialism = death

I don’t know what the author’s politics are, but he makes clear that most of the killing resulted from socialism. Socialist industry wasn’t growing fast enough, so Stalin forcibly collectivized farms to get money for industrialization. When industrialization still didn’t go fast enough, he shot hundreds of thousands of managers and engineers. He didn’t like it that there were seasonal variations in production in Leningrad, something that happens in every industry, so he ordered the production evened out — an impossibility. The Leningrad boss forged the paperwork, which was found out by his rivals. They told Stalin, who had the boss shot.

What’s clear is this: The more socialism, the more death. Total socialism means Stalinism. Lesser amounts of socialism — such as with Canada’s deadly health-care system — mean fewer deaths, but deaths nonetheless. “Democratic” socialism means rule by bureaucrats as much as Stalinist socialism. Given that America’s tax level is about 50%, we’re about 50% socialist — or 50% Stalinist. Socialism = death.

Biographers often joke that, by the end of their books, they’re sick of their subjects. Montiefore had good reason to get sick of Stalin way before the end, as he lines up horrific detail after horrific detail. But he persevers almost to the end. Then even his loathing of Stalin comes through. As in a horror movie, the reader just is chanting, “Die! Die! Die!”

At the end, Stalin begins his attack on the Jews, the phony “Doctors’ Plot,” that would have been another Holocaust. Although bigoted against Jews, he’s not a racial anti-Semite, like Hitler. Indeed, one of his top henchmen, Kaganovich, was Jewish. But after World War II Stalin distrusts Jews because they had an identity other than worshiping him and the Soviet Union.

He also starts going after his top henchmen and their wives. Molotov’s wife, Polina, was Jewish and had a brother who was a businessman in America. She was sent to the Lubyanka prison. (Although innocent of treason, she backed Stalin and helped hubby Molotov during his 1930s trips to starve out the peasants.)

Sebag-Montefrroe concludes that Stalin’s fatal stroke in March 1953 probably would have killed him no matter what. But his bodyguards, instead of calling in doctors, call in his top henchmen, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Bulganin, who soon are joined by the out-of-favor Molotov and Mikoyan. The henchmen wait many hours before calling the doctors.

The doctors called are incompetent because the best doctors are in the Gulag. Any remote chance of saving Stalin is lost. He dies.

The “Doctors’ Plot” purge is canceled. Molotov’s wife, Polina, is released. But even until their natural deaths years later, Molotov and Polina remained unrepentant Stalinists.

“Uncle Joe”

Stalin remains popular among some people in Russia because he supposedly was a “strong man,” vozhd in Russian, who made the USSR a global empire. Actually, he almost killed Russia, which today is thriving only because it’s doing the opposite of his nutty socialism by adopting capitalism.

Also amazing is that Stalin was worshiped in America as “Uncle Joe,” our cuddly “democratic” ally in World War II. Over the years I even have argued with some left-wing Americans who thought Stalin’s mass starvation and purges were “necessary” to build the industrial base that beat Hitler in World War II.

Except that Hitler won a lot of votes in 1932 because Germans and many others in Europe were deathly afraid of communism; Stalin’s killing of about 10% of the Soviet people before the war took away a lot of soldiers; Stalin’s purges of the Red Army just before the war took away its best leadership; his purges of top engineers took away a lot of weapons-design talent; and his own idiocy in not heeding multiple warnings of Hitler’s invasion let the Nazis get the jump on him.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao — it’s hard to say who was worse.

May humankind never see their likes again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Socialism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.