334. The Kremlin physicians Dmitry Pletnev and Lev Levin (executed in 1938) were said to have arrived at the diagnosis of paranoia, but Levin was an internist and Pletnev a heart specialist, and they appear to have diagnosed Stalin with a heart condition and gall bladder ailment. Valedinskii, “Organizm Stalina vpolne zdorovyi.” For the hearsay, see Volski and Souvarine, “Un Caligula à Moscou,” 16; Souvarine, Staline (1977), 582. Superficial psychologizing about dictators is rampant: Glad, “Why Tyrants Go Too Far.” Rees, writing of Stalin, sought to distinguish between “criminal psychopaths,” who tend to be impulsive, reckless, and “Machiavellian psychopaths,” who are calculating, organized, determined, untroubled by self-doubt, audacious and often rise to the top of organizations. Rees, Iron Lazar, 218–22. See also Kovalevskii, Psikhiatricheskie eskizy iz istorii, III: 65–75 (on Ivan the Terrible). Stalin’s self-control was duly noted by Conquest, Roy Medvedev, and many others. See Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 494. One scholar has rightly observed that “the precise proportions of political calculation and psychological derangement that drove Stalin to these extreme measures will always be a matter of speculation.” Rieber, “Stalin as Foreign Policy Maker,” 142–3.
335. Rybin, Riadom so Stalinym, 76.
336. Molotov later admitted that he and Stalin knew the secret police exaggerated the supposed threat, but Molotov did not admit that Stalin relentlessly pressured the police to do so. Chuev, Molotov, 466, 473–5.
337. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin, 237–47.
338. Machiavelli, Gosudar’; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 315; Tucker, Stalin in Power, 282. Others denied Machiavelli’s influence on Stalin: Souvarine, Stalin, 563, 583. Volkogonov claims he saw Stalin’s copy of Machiavelli: Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, II/1: 107. Nikolai Ryzhkov, Soviet prime minister under Gorbachev, claims he read Stalin’s underlined copy of Machiavelli: “To tell the truth, the book with its markings gave me a thousand times greater understanding of the personality of Stalin than all the biographies, all the films, about him, all the recollections of his friends and enemies.” Ryzhkov made off with it. Ryzhkov, Perestroika, 354–6. The underlinings, in Russian, are: “Neestestvenno, chtoby vooruzhenyi stal okhotno pokoriat’sia nevooruzhenomu”; “Bez boiazni mogut byt’ Gosudari zhestokimi v voennoe vremia.”
339. Volubuev and Kuleshov, Ochishchenie, 146.
340. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 267.
341. In the discussion of Augustus Octavian in Samuil Lozinskii’s History of the Ancient World: Greece and Rome (Petrograd, 1923), Stalin underlined “first citizen, prince . . . supreme ruler.” Volobuev and Kulsheov, “Istoriia ne terpit polupravdy.”
342. Van Ree, Political Thought, 258–61.
343. Discussion of statecraft was almost entirely absent from Marx’s voluminous writings. He had begun from the premise that the state did not possess interests of its own but incarnated class interests; those class interests were, therefore, the main object of analysis. Marx saw no need to subject the state’s institutions and procedures—which differ significantly from country to country—to careful analysis. True, the phenomenon of Napoleon III in France provoked a change of heart in Marx, but not a full-fledged rethinking. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 130–1; Civil War in France, 42. Engels had famously added the idea that after the proletarian revolution, as class contradictions were overcome, the state would “wither away.” Lenin, initially, had also concurred that the state was an instrument of class oppression and would wither away (State and Revolution [1903]), but then changed his mind, albeit without managing to fill the theoretical gap.
344. van Ree, Political Thought, 135–8, 258.
345. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 143, l. 372, 382, 424, 438.
346. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 202, l. 21.
347. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 551–3; Brzezinski, Permanent Purge, 168.
348. Isaac Deutscher would imagine that Stalin ordered the purges to prevent “the managerial groups from consolidating as a social stratum,” which could indeed have been part of Stalin’s thinking. But Deutscher remained under the spell of Stalin’s supposed special targeting of the Old Bolsheviks. Deutscher, Prophet Outcast, 306–7. It has been asserted with no evidence that young, aggressive new administrative cadres themselves pushed for the terror, being envious of the old guard Leninists. Voslensky, Nomenklatura (1984), 53–5, (1980), 82–6.
