Stalin полностью

9. Robert Caro has argued that Lyndon Johnson had a “hunger for power not to improve the lives of others but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will in a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.” Of course, Johnson was head of the Senate and then president in a constitutional order. Caro, Path to Power, xix.

10. Much escaped Stalin’s attention, obviously. And yet, nothing was too trivial to be brought to him by someone, or for him to involve himself. “People say that the square on the Arbat (where there used to be a church, in front of the cinema) has not yet been paved with blocks (or asphalt),” he wrote to Kaganovich (September 24, 1931) from Sochi. “Shameful! One of the busiest squares and it is full of potholes! Pressure them and make them finish up the square.” Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 117 (RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 99, l. 38).

11. Sometimes the underlining in documents was done by an aide. Sometimes the underlining could be absent-minded, without retention. Much is not underlined. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 221, I/ii: 141, II/ii: 153; Khlevniuk, Stalin; Zhizn’, 144–5.

12. “He wrote everything himself,” Molotov would recall. “The staff never wrote for him. This was a Leninist tradition. Zinoviev wrote for himself, Kamenev, too, not to mention Trotsky.” Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 168. Stalin’s style borrowed from the catechism approach of his seminary training, and was well suited for agitation among the lower orders, including non-native speakers, where he had cut his teeth.

13. Brooks, “Thank You, Comrade Stalin!,” 83–105. “What more is there to ask when there is Soviet power; when exploitation, oppression, lack of rights, and slavery have been abolished forever; when there is the party of Lenin-Stalin, a worker-peasant government, which exists only to make an abundant, joyful, and happy life for millions of working people—the men and women of the new socialist society,” a group of female shock workers were quoted in Pravda (March 11, 1936). “We are obliged to you, our own dear Iosif Vissarionovich.” Pravda, March 11, 1936. “Our republic,” the writer Mikhail Prishvin had written in his diary in mid-1929, “resembles a photographic dark room, in which not a single ray of light is admitted from the outside, but inside everything is illuminated by a red lantern.” Prishvin, Dnevniki, VI: 432 (July 22, 1929).

14. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia, 65 (Feb. 27, 1979).

15. Rees, “Leader Cults,” at 22.

16. Goebbels intuited that “genius” was fine, but a leader needed to be in touch with the pulse of the people. Kershaw, “Hitler Myth,” 59. See also Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/ii: 308.

17. Lewin, Making of the Soviet System (1985, 1994).

18. In 1935 the regime had stepped up the deportations of certain ethnics and convicted criminals, increased the size of the NKVD border guards, and erected forbidden zones along the western border, sometimes more than ten miles wide, removing people and installing barbed wire, watch towers, and strips of raked land in which footprints could be spotted. Dullin, La frontière épaisse, 206. See also Erickson, Soviet High Command, 406–7; and Chandler, Institutions of Isolation, 55–66; and XVII s”ezd, 71–3.

19. “The Bolsheviks can satisfy the characteristic human striving for a purposeful and significant life, man’s natural craving to transcend the humdrum routine of daily life, to give his activities a purpose more than personal.” Gurian, Bolshevism. See also Stern, “National Socialism as Temptation,” 151.

20. Garros et al., Intimacy and Terror, 206 (Galina Shtange). See also Overy, Dictators, 54–5.

21. Jasny, Soviet Industrialization.

22. Vagts, “Capitalist Encirclement,” 506. See also Izvestiia, March 21, 1937: 2 (Zhdanov).

23. An entry on the “Inquisition” in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that happened to appear in 1937 noted that “during just eighteen years under the principal Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada, more than 10,000 people were burned alive.” Bol’shaia Sovetskaia entsiklopediia (1937), XXVIII: 510–2.