![]() ![]() In Russia, with its passion for secrecy and conspiracy, this has been particularly pronounced. In every authoritarian state, political life too readily becomes a struggle for access to the ruler and for the control of his sources of information. Why do I single out for attention these three aspects of Stalin's life and character? I single them out because they all point to the same thing: namely, to his extreme dependence on his own friends and advisors. And the whole Kremlin, when closely observed, bears a depressing resemblance to a vast and chilly museum. The Moscow police, they say, are instructed to view with suspicion diplomats found to be anywhere except in an automobile, in a museum, or at the "Swan Lake" ballet. His bent from his Kremlin office to his datcha is no more revealing than the well-worn cowpaths of the Moscow diplomatic corps and the precautions taken for his safety must make it nearly as hard for him to survey Moscow as it is for Moscow to survey him. If not even the humble diplomatic secretary can visit a Russian provincial town quietly and normally, on his own, without swarms of guides and escorts, without elaborate preparations for his reception, without vodka and caviar and speeches, think what it must be for Stalin to try to catch his countrymen off guard. During all this time, he has probably never known what it is to walk down a street by the light of day, like anybody else, and to see life as others see it. It is doubtful if in the course of the past fifteen years he has ever had the sensation of being alone or of mingling unobserved with other people. ![]() Foreign representatives, fretting over their isolation in Moscow's diplomatic ghetto, should bear in mind that of all the people in Moscow Stalin himself is probably the most isolated. The placid give and take of Anglo-Saxon life, in particular: the tempering of all enmity and all intimacy, the balancing function of personal self-respect, the free play of opposing interests - these things would remain incomprehensible, implausible, to him. Of western life in general, he could not possibly understand very much. A brief glimpse of Stockholm, in his younger days, left little or no impression on his fevered imagination. ![]() His life has known only what Lenin called "the incredibly swift transition from wild violence to the most delicate deceit”. From that he graduated into the Dostoyevskian atmosphere of revolutionary conspiracy in European Russia. Stalin's youth is shrouded in the mists of underworld revolutionary activity – largely in his native Caucasus. Second – his ignorance of the western world. It is difficult for him to be anything in between. Courageous but wary quick to anger and suspicion but patient and persistent in the execution of his purposes capable of acting with great decision or of waiting and dissembling, as circumstances may require outwardly modest and simple, but jealous of the prestige and dignity of the state which he heads not learned, yet shrewd and pitilessly realistic exacting in his demands for loyalty, respect and obedience a keen and unsentimental student of men – he can be, like a true Georgian hero, a great and good friend or an implacable, dangerous enemy. But he has not lost the characteristics of his native environment. He does not now consider himself much of a Georgian and history will have to admit that he has become one of the greatest of Russian national figures. That strange law of psychology which has more than once caused great peoples to accept the rule of obscure and untypical persons from their own peripheries has brought Stalin from the barren hills of Georgia to the seclusion of the Kremlin. Only his political figure is apparent and that figure is revealed at best in a series of brief and enigmatic glimpses.įrom the standpoint of one who would understand Russia today, there are certain points about Stalin which it is important to remember.įirst – that he is a Georgian. His personal life remains a mystery which not even the curiosity of the American press has been able to penetrate. No one knows exactly where, or with whom, he lives. None have ever had any intimate contact with him. Only a handful of foreigners have ever seen him. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, now in the sixty-fifth year of his life and the twentieth year of his power in Russia, is the most powerful and the least known of the world's rulers. (Excerpt from a Memorandum by George Kennan) ![]()
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