Attack of the Super Soviet Apemen!

It's an old story, sure - but since it's an otherwise slow news day for dictator updates, DotW would be remiss if we didn't revisit the story of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's plan to build an army of super Communist Apemen to attack and overthrow the bourgeois, decadent capitalist West.

The story begins in the early 1920s when Uncle Joe approached famed Soviet animal husbandry expert Ilya Ivanov with a startling proposition:

I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat ...

Now, some would argue that the bulk of the Soviet Red Army already fit this description, but Stalin was thinking big. The Politburo rubber stamped Stalin's directives for creating bioengineered soldiers, and ordered the Russian Academy Of Sciences to proceed with plans to create a "living war machine". Ivanov, who was not actually a crackpot unlike many of Stalin's pet scientists, pioneered horse breeding with his crude, but successful, artificial insemination techniques. So, Ivanov reasoned, if we can build a stronger, faster horse, we can certainly build a stronger, faster man.

The problem Ivanov faced is that selective breeding for humans is an extremely tricky business. Besides, even Russian soldiers drawn from the peasantry had, from time to time, been known to complain, feel pain, and even mutiny. So Ivanov took a page from Charles Darwin and looked to man's closest primate ancestor - the chimpanzee. Armed with a small fortune provided by the Politburo, Ivanov traveled to West Africa to collect the chimps and transport them back to the Soviet Union. At his hastily constructed breeding facility in Georgia, Ivanov repeatedly tried, and failed, to impregnate the chimps with human sperm samples. Moving on to plan two, peasant girls were "volunteered" for attempted impregnation with chimpanzee sperm.

Naturally, the harder Ivanov tried, the more he failed. When Stalin grew impatient and demanded a progress report, Ivanov knew his time was running out. In desperation, he tried (and failed) to obtain newer (somehow better?) monkeys from a Cuban heiress, but the story leaked to the Western press, and Ivanov became an international laughing stock. The jig was up. Failing Uncle Joe was bad enough without making the Soviet Union look bad, and Ivanov died shortly after his exile to Karaganda.

The moral? No man could make a monkey out of Josef Stalin.

Getting to know Iosef Dzhugashvili

Do recognize the unassuming young man in the picture? No? What if I told you his name - Iosef Dzugashvili. Does that help?

No?

What if I told you his famous pseudonym: Koba. Would that tell you more?

No?

Ok, it's time to let the cat out of the bag. The picture is of Josef Stalin, born Iosef Dzugashvili in the small town of Gori in then Russian Georgia. It's also Dzugashvili as opposed to his more ferocious and infamous adult incarnation that is the subject of Simon Sebag Montefiore's new book Young Stalin, a book the New York Times has cheekily (but not inaccurately) described as a portrait of the "dictator as a young poet-thug". Montefiore's book apparently expands on where Donald Rayfield and Robert Conquest have tread only briefly to provide what may be the most comprehensive biography yet of the man who would become Josef Stalin. While I haven't read Young Stalin yet, I certainly intend to do so soon, but I'd already learned about Iosef Dzugashvili surprised me at first, as it surprises everyone who first learns about the man who become the powerful man of the 20th century.

Unlike his German contemporary, the young Dzugashvili has a credible claim to being an artist, with a talent for Georgian poetry. Also unlike Hitler, Dzugashvili was a quick study and an adept student - when not rebelling against the monastery where he was educated. Though an avid reader, the young man was also a street brawler, who managed to intimidate with his brawn despite losing much of the use of an arm that withered after it was run over by a horse drawn carriage. Undoubtedly, a vicious streetfighting intellectual seems to be a contradiction in terms, but not for Dzugashvili, who quickly learned to hide his brains and overemphasize his strength - a decision that served him extremely well for the rest of his life. And when young Dzugashvili had finally morphed into Stalin, the Man of Steel, his Bolshevik rivals - especially Trotsky - bought into his ruse, continually underestimating him as some sort of uneducated, bloodthirsty country bumpkin. This image alone kept Stalin out of the picture while the party intellectuals fought each other for power, allowing Stalin to sit back and wait to see who would emerge victorious.

Stalin invented a ridiculous biography to obscure what were, frankly, his more interesting (if infinitely more humble) origins, and I eagerly await reading Young Stalin to learn yet ever more about the man behind the monstrous myth. Perhaps I'll even read it by candlelight on Halloween, just for the effect ..

Soviet posters

Thank heavens for the internet. First Stefan Landsberger took the time and care to create his archive of Chinese communist propaganda posters, and now Alexander Zakarov has upped the ante with a blog devoted solely to Soviet posters.

I certainly owe Josh at The Conjecturer one for linking to this amazing blog in the first place. where I could find it.

60 years later, Seeger is denouncing Stalin

I nearly spit out my coffee today when America's preeminent communist folksinger, Pete Seeger, finally admitted that, perhaps, Josef Stalin was more of a cruel tyrant than he was an enlightened socialist leader. I congratulate Pete for his bravery in denouncing Josef Stalin a mere 51 years after Stalin's own successor, Nikita Khrushchev, did. I guess he finally decided it was either safe, or non-controversial enough, to finally do so. Good show, Pete.

I name dropped "Stalin's Songbird" back in my post about dictator chic over a year ago, but never in my wildest dreams could I imagine that Pete Seeger would not only apologize for lionizing Stalin, but actually wrote a song daring to criticize Stalin. During the 1940's and early 1950's, Seeger stuck to the Kremlin's party line without error. When Stalin and Adolf Hitler forged their infamous non-aggression treaty, Seeger put out a strongly anti-war record, Songs for John Doe. Needless to say, when Hitler double-crossed Stalin, Seeger's mood and artistic outlook mysteriously changed in perfect accord with the party line. Songs for John Doe was withdrawn by the label, and Seeger joined the imperialist, capitalist, bourgeois American army. Who could have foreseen it?

In fairness to Seeger, he broke with the communist party in 1950, but oddly, he's had almost nothing to say for the past 50 years about the "paragon of humanity" he praised to the heavens and back during his years in the Communist Party of the USA. We heard a lot of singing about Vietnam, Selma and Lyndon Johnson, but not so much about Katyn or Kolyma. Seeger blames the Soviet emphasis on Leninist party discipline for his rigid adherence and continued silence, but let's face it: Seeger was also probably fairly embarrassed. Seeger's most enthusiastic support for Stalin came at the same time as Stalin was occupying himself with the starvation of the Ukraine and unleashing a reign of terror.

Now the octogenarian Seeger is attempting to make good with his usual tool - song. Included is a snippet of the "Anti-Joe Blues"

I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe
He ruled with an iron hand!
He put an end to the dreams
Of so many in every land

He had a chance to make
A brand new start for the human race
Instead he set it back
Right in the same nasty place

I got the Big Joe Blues
Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast
I got the Big Joe Blues
Do this job, no questions asked
I got the Big Joe Blues

OK, so it's a little on the obvious side, but I suppose it's better late than never, right?

Putin gives Stalin some love

Just how many millions of his countrymen does a dictator have to murder these days before he's reviled by his subjects? The late Soviet strongman Josef Stalin would doubtlessly be tickled to know that the Russian government is putting a new shine on Uncle Joe's reign of terror by giving him an image makeover in high school history textbooks. According to the latest textbooks, Stalin's rule was "strong" if a bit "cruel", but it's OK! After all, Stalin was merely using his indomitable will to strengthen the Soviet state. Why, that's just like Peter the Great, right? Or even Vladimir Putin! So really, what's all the fuss about, anyway?

Stalin's image makeover coincides with Putin's saber rattling with Georgia, land of Stalin's birth. Doubtlessly, Stalin would heartily approve of a strong, if cruel, leader looking to hold Russia together ... even if it just happens to mean swallowing up independent countries entirely. That's just what "strong" leaders do, right?

Welcome to Stalinworld!

Russia has recently declassified documents from the reign of Josef Stalin to allow access to the records of people arrested, jailed, tortured, exiled to the GULAG or executed by family members of the victims.

From the years of 1920 - 1950, nearly 30 million Soviet citizens were "repressed" (to use the official term) by Stalin's security services, with anywhere from 10 to 15 million of them dying either from execution or exposure and starvation in a prison camp. Today, the modern ancestor of Stalin's NKVD (the FSB) is the agency taking the lid off the histories of people who, for all intents and purposes, had simply disappeared.

So is there a catch? Yes. Access to the archives is only provided to surviving relatives of the politically repressed, and will not be made available to the public. While this is certainly a boon to the families of victims, it must be remembered that most of the surviving relatives who were small children during Stalin's bloodiest are now starting to get quite old. Why aren't the Russians releasing the information to journalists and historians? Perhaps they are, and just want the families to have first crack at them, although the current trends under current Russian president Vladimir Putin suggest that these records will head back under lock and key once the "healing period" is over.

I wondered: is it too much to hope that the Russians will opt for total disclosure, as the Germans have with regards to Nazi atrocities? The quick answer is, "yes, of course it is". Since the end of World War 2, no other country on earth has undergone as much self-analysis and self-criticism as Germany has. Russia, by way of contrast, will have none of it. Would you believe that Stalin, even today, remains popular in Russia? Where German schools have spared no details on the nature of Nazi atrocities, most Russians don't learn the extent of Stalin's bloodbaths at home or abroad until they leave Russia.

You know, why dwell on the negative all the time, anyway?

Forgetting to remember? Remembering to forget?

OK, OK - I know what I said yesterday. I really hadn't intended to spend most of the week at Dictators of the World going on and on about communism, Sometimes, however, that's just the way it turns out. So it's fitting that on the day I wrote about history's "killing joke" and took a moment to ponder communism's earth shattering body count, a monument was dedicated in Washington DC to the victims of the world's bloodiest political ideology.

President Bush was on hand to dedicate the Victims of Communism memorial in a small park between Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues in Washington, but in an age where the president of the United States can't even take a leak without at least 300 reporters following him around, this event received fairly minimal notice. The memorial itself was created in 1993 by an act of congress which sought to dedicate some sort of memorial to the more than 100,000,000 people who died as a result of communist oppression, slavery, mass murder and genocide. In typically bureaucratic Washington fashion, the most memorial was finally finished a mere 14 years later. Depressingly, that long since nearly everyone in America had stopped caring, and long enough to realize that kids today probably won't be learning much about it in schools.

Right on cue, China denounced the memorial, saying that it "[provoked] conflicts between different ideologies and social systems". China, of course, may have simply been somewhat embarrassed. In the truly epic body count caused of communism, somewhere between 20 to 30 million people starved to death - the worst famine in world history - during Mao Zedong's disastrous Great Leap Forward. It's a predictable denunciation. After all, a communist party - even if it's communist in name only - still runs the show in China, so it stands to reason that their culpability in the senseless deaths of so many dozens of millions makes them just a bit uncomfortable. It probably also doesn't help that the memorial statue itself looks like a certain statue that featured prominently in the 1989 Tianamen Square demonstrations.

America's memorial, however good the intentions were in building it, feels a day late and a dollar short. A number of countries in the former Soviet bloc have built their own memorials to the victims of communism that evoke something ours cannot - the horror of familiarity. It's a good bet that schoolkids in Prague and Warsaw will not be forgetting the lessons of communist rule because their parents' generation won't allow it to happen. In fact, making sure our own kids learned the history of communism's deadly legacy would be worth more than a hundred of these memorials, and better still, would make the memorial itself irrelevant in practical terms.

The sad fact of the matter is, as long as the system's apologists continue to be so robustly overrepresented in academia, the arts and even in governments around the world, the victims of communism will never really be at rest. Who cares about a memorial when the horror it remembers is not only still alive, but even remembered fondly?

UPDATE: Michael Weiss writes a stellar piece blasting the "faux-cialist" movement over on Jewcy.

Faux Joe

Over at Jim Lileks' Bleat comes this astounding 1940's era Soviet propaganda film showing a mythical visit by Josef Stalin to newly occupied Berlin. The propaganda film was created to glorify the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, but if you think it seems a little weird, you're not alone. The most interesting thing about it (which Jim notes) is how it has the genuine authenticity found only in totalitarian propaganda. Stalin's is shown flying in one kind of plane, landing on another, while long shots of Stalin were performed by a body double, and only a portion of the footage, filmed deep within Soviet territory, is actually of Stalin. Check it out for yourself:








All that makeup makes him look too much like Rip Taylor for my comfort. Or anyone's comfort.

UPDATE: I really didn't intend to have a communist/Soviet theme this week, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

The killing joke

The story may be apocryphal, but is nevertheless revealing. After the Soviet archives, recently opened to the west, confirmed without a doubt the deliberate and calculated nature of Josef Stalin's punitive famine in the Ukraine, the British Sovietologist Robert Conquest was asked by his publisher if he would like to add a subtitle to the newest edition of his book about the famine, Harvest of Sorrow. Conquest, never at a loss for a memorable quote, is said to have quipped, "how about: I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?"

There was certainly no doubt about the brutal nature of communist rule during the existence of the Soviet Union. Indeed, Lenin and his politburo made almost no effort to hide the extent of their Red Terror campaigns from the rest of the world, reasoning somewhat sensibly that the world would only respect their reign only if they sensed they were operating without mercy or scruples. The question is, why would anyone lend their support, tacit or explicit, to a political system whose primary political concerns often seemed to boil down to the elimination of its enemies, real or imagined? The answer, of course, is that the Soviet system talked a progressive game while playing a more brutal one. Yes, the free health care and housing for all angle appealed to the progressive political left, but even when it came at the price of genocide, the complete elimination of freedom of expression, and the institution of a paranoid police state? Today, we consider ourselves politically and historically sophisticated enough to laugh at any defense of Benito Mussolini's fascist state by arguing that he made the trains run on time. Yet we don't have to look far to find tenacious defenders of Soviet brutality operating out in the open.

The defense of the indefensible was put on display yesterday in a book review of Oxford University historian Robert Service's "Comrades!: A World History of Communism" for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper. Guardian editor Seumas Milne denounced Service for being so damned negative about the history of communism. Milne blasted Service for downplaying the way the Soviet Union delivered, "rapid industrialization, mass education, full employment and unprecedented advances in social and gender equality", and scolded Service for downplaying the Soviet role in defeating Nazi Germany. In other words, Milne wants us to know that the trains ran on time!

We can give Milne the benefit of the doubt by presuming his ignorance about the cost to benefit ratio of Soviet achievements to Soviet horrors is based on a misty nostalgia about a Communism that never was - a communism that could deliver egalitarianism coupled with the universal material comfort that Marxism promised. Unfortunately for Milne, even the Soviets knew better than to believe in political fairy tales. Which isn't to say they didn't try, of course. The "rapid industrialization" of the Soviet Union that Milne would like us to remember as such a towering accomplishment could only take place after the deliberate annhiliation of the Soviet agrarian class. Mass education? Of course, but only after the Soviet Union had attacked the intellectual class, created the world's largest bureaucracy dedicated to censorship and eliminated freedom of speech. And so it goes. Each advance brought by Communism was paid for in blood, death and terror. So why would anyone in their right mind continue to shill for the world's deadliest political system?

Robert Service promptly a fantastic rebuttal to Milne's loathsome nostalgia for tyranny, and set about dismantling Milne's Soviet eulogies piece by piece. Service correctly maintains that the primary lesson to be learned about the history of communist governance is that "repression was not some aberrant phenomenon under communist rule around the world. It was condoned in advance." Indeed, as Service also notes, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed and people could choose communist parties as just one of many other options, they rejected communism resoundingly.

Finally, Service took aim at Milne's sloppy tarring of hostility to communism with the world's trendiest catch-all epithet neoconservative with the following:

It would seem that Milne and his like consider it fair game to denounce anybody who comes to an anti-communist standpoint as a neocon. This is a shoddy way to handle a serious political discussion. If this farrago had not come from the editor of the comment pages of one of our national newspapers it would not be worth bothering about. What is more, Milne is typical of a more general trend that retains a nostalgia for communism, and is a trend that ought to be repudiated.

Could you imagine, for a moment, the scandal Milne's naked defense of communist totalitarianism would cause if applied to the benefit of German Nazism or Spanish fascism? I can't, and it's heartening to see that Service is in no mood to apologize for totalitarianism simply because its ideological pretenses made a stab at his own left-of-center political erogenous zones. If only Seumas Milne, and so many others like him, would stop providing the laugh track for history's killing joke.

Mustache clash

A newly published book claims that one of history's most notorious mustaches was borne of necessity.

According to a newly published biography of the writer Alexander Moritz Frey, Der Führer used to sport a larger, bushier mustache popular at the time in Bavaria when he joined the German army in the first world war. However, the long bushy mustache didn't fit under the newfangled German army gas masks, and so Hitler's superiors ordered him to give it a trim to comply with the new safety regulations. Frey recalls meeting Hitler in 1915:

"A pale, tall man tumbled down into the cellar after the first shells of the daily evening attacks had begun to fall, fear and rage glowing in his eyes. At that time, he looked tall because he was so thin. A full moustache, which had to be trimmed later because of the new gas masks, covered the ugly slit of his mouth"

Even the trim wouldn't prevent Hitler from being badly hurt in an English gas attack in 1918, which temporarily blinded him. In the battle of iconic mustaches, however, even Hitler's instantly recognizable facial hair was no match for the mighty bristle of his Georgian adversary, who sported perhaps the mightiest dictator mustache of all time:

Now that's what I call a mustache.

It's May Day, comrades!

It is May Day, comrades! Our glorious leader has smashed the decadent, capitalist world order and restored power to the proletariat! Long live the workers! Long live the Red Army! Long live Comrade Stalin!

Click here to visit the glorious people's May Day parade in Moscow, 1959!

UPDATE: Speaking of Soviet hangovers, Joshua Foust at Registan.net is unimpressed with the glacial pace of Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov's "political reform" in Turkmenistan. Read Joshua's analysis here.

UPDATE II: Fidel Castro a "no-show" at Havana's May Day parade. Poor Hugo.

Estonia's persistence of memory

The ordinarily sedate city of Tallinn, Estonia was rocked by rioting this weekend as ethnic Russians in Estonia looted stores, smashed windows and lit fires as part of a protest by the Estonian government to relocate a Soviet era statue (and mass grave) commemorating the Red Army soldiers who died liberating Estonia from Nazi Germany in 1944.

Actually, we need to back up a bit here.

Before the Soviet Union "liberated" Estonia, it had conquered Estonia with Adolf Hitler's full consent. You see, before Hitler and Josef Stalin went to war with each other, they agreed on a division of Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", and codified it in a treaty - the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once absorbed into Stalinist Russia, Estonia suffered the full brunt of the "glorious socialist brotherhood" that nearly wiped out dozens of non-Russian Soviet republics, including mass deportations to Siberia, mass executions, torture as well as religious and political repression by the NKVD.

In 1941, Hitler doublecrossed Stalin. Hitler's plan for assaulting the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, smashed through Soviet defenses in Poland, and quickly reached the Baltic countries, including Estonia. Estonians were initially overjoyed to see the wehrmacht chasing the Soviets out. After all, how could it get any worse than being ruled by Stalin? Their hopes were dashed by the heavy hand of the Nazi occupation, yet thousands of Estonians willingly joined the wehrmacht when it became clear that the Soviets would retake Estonia. Estonians knew they were deep trouble when the Nazis looked like the lesser of two evils. To make a long story short, the Soviets recaptured Estonia in 1944, and quickly picked up where they left off, liquidating all "traitors to the motherland", as well as their families including minor children, the elderly and infirm. Estonians had to be wondering - who's liberating us from whom?

When Estonia finally broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonians had made it clear that Estonia was a decidedly unwilling participant in the Soviet experiment. Estonia even joined NATO as soon as possible to safeguard its hard won independence from Russia. However, Soviet "Russification" policies meant that ethnic Russians made up nearly one third of Estonia's population, and what's more, a third of the population that neither spoke Estonian, nor wanted to give up the privileges they had enjoyed under Soviet rule. Estonia wanted Russians who decided to stay in Estonia to learn how to speak Estonian, and integrate into Estonian society. Many of these Russians (who were not made citizens of Estonia after independence, incidentally) wanted to keep speaking Russian, and they've demanded that their Estonian "little brothers" show the proper love and gratitude to Russia, especially an appreciation of Stalin's "liberation" of Estonia from the Nazis.

You can see where this was heading, can't you?

For years, a statue erected by the Soviets to commemorate the war in Estonia (known as the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn) had a double meaning. For Russians, it symbolized the shedding of Russian blood to liberate Russia from the Nazis. For Estonians, it represents a symbol of bloodthirsty Stalinist colonialist imperialism. Estonians wanted the statue gone. Russians wanted it to stay. Finally, the Estonian government decided to relocate the statue and the Soviet soldiers buried underneath it - and that's when all hell broke loose.

Estonia's ethnic Russians began rioting, incensed that Estonia would dare disrespect the Soviet war effort. Russia itself began to chime in, sending a "fact finding mission" to Estonia, and demanding that the Estonian government resign en masse. In Moscow, hostile crowds began assaulting the Estonian embassy and threatening Estonia's diplomatic corp, an astonishing abrogation of Russia's duties to defend foreign embassies from violence. Russia claims it is "powerless" to protect the Estonian embassy. Estonians claim that the Russian police look pretty good at crowd control when it involves Russians protesting against Vladimir Putin. Russia is making oblique threats to break diplomatic ties with Estonia. Rumors of an armed ethnic Russian insurgency being organized inside Estonia are even circulating.

All of this over a statue? World War II ended over 60 years ago, but the current battle over history and memory is still being fought in Estonia. I can't help but think that somewhere, Josef Stalin is having a hearty laugh about all of this.

No Mo' Joe

What's the first thing that would come to mind if you'd heard that the mayor of Jerusalem used the image of Adolf Hitler in an anti-littering campaign? It would probably be along the lines of has he lost his fucking mind?

So you can imagine the reaction of many Ukrainians when officials of Ukrainian city of Donetsk dusted off the image of Josef Stalin for use in a series of public service announcements aimed at getting residents to pay off their delinquent utility bills. One television ad showed grainy black and white footage of Koba with an overdubbed voice howling "Those who don't pay for their heat should be PUNISHED!" to the thunderous applause of a sycophantic Politburo.

First of all, the use of dictators for marketing purposes, while not new, is fairly stupid by any measure. The use of dictators in advertising becomes even more loathsome when the targeted audience is the exact same one that suffered most because of the dictator in question. This advertising campaign would merely be stupid in Russia or Georgia, but it transforms into an affront of monumentally bad taste in the Ukraine. You don't even have to go back too far in the history of Donetsk itself to get into Uncle Joe's legacy, as the city itself was once renamed "Stalino" by Stalinist toadies, even as Stalin was tightening the screws on the Ukraine.

So what did Donetsk's municipal utility company have to say about their ill conceived ad campaign?

"Stalin is used here not as a historical personality, but more as a symbol of inevitable punishment. Failure to pay for one's services is a serious wrongdoing."

Oh, why didn't you just say so in the first place? No problem then, I guess.

Hey, Joe ...

... where you going with that pipe in your hand? But seriously, folks.

Can't get enough of Uncle Joe? If so, don't miss the Magnum Photos essay about the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin over at Slate. Party like it's 1939, right here. Be forewarned, comrades: few, if any, of the photos conform to the glorious Soviet standard of socialist realism, and I suspect that some of them may be even serving counterrevolutionary purposes!

Have you heard the one about ... ?

What did Soviet strongman Josef Stalin and Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu have in common? They both loved a good joke! Well, not exactly, but Ben Lewis has written an enthralling essay on the role of political jokes behind the Iron Curtain. Besides the analysis of the role of jokes inside repressive political systems, some of the jokes are actually pretty good. My favorite thus far is this gem rumored to be told by Stalin himself:

"Stalin himself cracked [jokes], including this one about a visit from a Georgian delegation: They come, they talk to Stalin, and then they go, heading off down the Kremlin's corridors. Stalin starts looking for his pipe. He can't find it. He calls in Beria, the dreaded head of his secret police. "Go after the delegation, and find out which one took my pipe," he says. Beria scuttles off down the corridor. Five minutes later Stalin finds his pipe under a pile of papers. He calls Beria--"Look, I've found my pipe." "It's too late," Beria says, "half the delegation admitted they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning."

Oh sure, today's politicians are handy with self-deprecation, but it's almost impossible to imagine the fear that must have seized anyone hearing Stalin joke about himself. Would you dare laugh? Would you dare stay silent? More than any joke,the paralyzing fear of someone unable to know how to react was exactly the sort of thing Stalin found hilarious.