The Last Liberal and Other Essays by Guha Ramachandra

Author:Guha, Ramachandra [Guha, Ramachandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788178244235
Publisher: Permanent Black
Published: 2013-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Greatest Criminal in History: Joseph Stalin

There was a great Marxist called Lenin Who did two or three million men in That's a lot to do in But where he did one in That great Marxist Stalin did ten in.

—Robert Conquest

D

ictators, whether of left or right, have a way of totally isolating themselves from their subjects. The historian Robert Conquest thus writes of Joseph Stalin that 'his social life was an imperfectly maintained pretence, which eventually degenerated into forced jollity with coarse and terrified toadies'. On 28 February 1953, Stalin had his last supper in his dacha with four of these toadies: Beria, Malenkov, Khruschev, and Bulganin. They watched a film, and then had a five-course meal with plenty of liquor. The meal ended at five in the morning, with Stalin 'pretty drunk and in high spirits'—as he would be, having done much of the drinking, and all the talking.

After dinner Stalin took a steam bath and crawled into bed. When he had not emerged until ten at night, his bodyguards broke into his room, to find him lying on the carpet, conscious but unable to move or speak. Doctors were now sent for, who plied him with injections and pills and fed him with a spoon. The Lord of Greater Russia had regressed to being a child. Indeed, according to one eyewitness, almost the only gesture he made in these last days was to point at a picture on the wall of children feeding a little lamb from a bottle, as if to say—that is what I have now become.

Stalin eventually died on the 5th of March, the cause, as officially diagnosed, a burst blood vessel in the brain. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of India sent a message to their Soviet counterparts:

With sorrow too deep for tears, we pay our homage to the memory of Comrade Stalin. Mankind has lost its noblest representative, the movement for human liberation its greatest leader, the cause of Peace its indefatigable champion . . . Stricken with grief at the passing away of this titan of human thought and action, we, Communists of the present generation, shall ever recollect with pride that we have lived in the same epoch as Comrade Stalin, have been guided and led by him, have been taught by him how to serve the working class and the people to the last drop of our blood.

Only slightly less effusive was the tribute offered by the ex-communist M.N. Roy. Roy had once known Stalin, while they worked together in the Comintern not long after the Bolshevik Revolution. But then Roy returned to India, and by the late 1930s had left the Party altogether. Yet, as Gene Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller write in their history of Indian communism, Stalin never lost his hold on him. Roy always remained, as he put it, 'a personal admirer of my ex-friend'. When Stalin died, Roy penned an extraordinary apologia in his journal Radical Humanist. He admitted that his friend was widely

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