Stalin's fiftieth shadow
A quick synopsis of the monster's life reads: born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, now in the Republic of Georgia, died in Moscow on March 5, 1953. Before his death Joseph Stalin managed to murder an estimated 20 million people, including doctors, nurses, teachers, writers, army officers, peasants, Balts, Cossacks, Georgians, Poles, Ukrainians, Christians, Jews, Communists and, especially, Russians. But why so many?
That's a question today's rulers of Russia will have to address at some point because the ruination of the once mighty Soviet Union is directly attributable to Stalin. He shot almost everyone who was intelligent and thereby ensured that the surviving mediocrities would manage to lose an empire within 40 years of his death. But despite the poverty and crime that are the legacy of failed communism, Russia's leaders are in no hurry to confront the legacy of Stalinism. In an interview last year, president Vladimir Putin said: "Stalin was of course a dictator...the problem is that it was under his leadership that the country won the second world war and that victory is to a significant extent associated with his name."
Regrettably, the 50th anniversary of the death of the mass murderer will not be marked in any special way in Russia today. I say regrettably because a healthy Russian democracy will not develop without a thorough accounting of Stalin's crimes, and the punishing of any surviving accomplices and perpetrators. Speaking darkly of a Russia unable to honestly deal with its past, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote: "Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be horrible to live in such a country."
Churchill described Stalin as "unnatural" and this is perhaps the best analysis of a man whose lust for blood was so insatiable that he lowered the age of the death penalty to just 12. If there is any satisfaction to be gained from writing about such a monster and his able executioners it comes from noting that the stupidity of the Soviet apologists has been exposed and that the gulags have been closed.
Diarist of the day: Edith Velmans, 5 March 1941"[Holland] Tonight I asked mother to repeat some of the old sayings that are good to know if you want to have a good life. E.g. from Schopenhauer, etc.: 'He who believes in goodness will gain goodness.' And: 'Trouble is the scale on which the true worth of friendship is weighed.' And I just found this one in my pocket diary: 'Look at the sun, then your shadow will fall behind you.' "
