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Joseph Stalin – the quiet tyrant.
I’ve just finished a long essay – more than 5,000 words – on Joseph Stalin for the Key Leaders section of the site. And writing it made me think once again of the people I’ve met who directly encountered Stalin, and of how their recollections were never quite what I expected.
I suppose, given that Stalin was responsible for the death of millions and had triumphed in the brutal stab-in-the-back (and stab-in-the-front) world of Soviet politics, I had imagined he would be an obviously terrifying figure to meet. But, though he undoubtably did often strike terror into the hearts of people called into his presence, he didn’t use obvious methods to dominate people. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, Stalin was not bombastic. Stalin rarely launched into lengthy monologues and he seldom screamed at people. Instead, he looked at them.
‘Stalin watched people’s eyes when he was speaking,’ says Stepan Mikoyan, who met Stalin a number of times. ‘And if you didn’t look him straight in the eye, he might well suspect that you were deceiving him. And he’d be capable of taking the most unpleasant steps… He was very suspicious. That was his main character trait… He was a very unprincipled man… He could betray and deceive if he thought it was necessary. And that’s why he expected the same behaviour from others… anyone could turn out to be a traitor.’
