What makes Stalin notable is that he brought about the deaths of more human beings than anyone else in the 20th century, and probably more than anyone else in history, with the possible exception of Mao. Yet he is still regarded as a hero by many people in the former Soviet Union and by ‘useful idiots’ elsewhere. His vice-like grip on all the means of mass communication accounts for much of this false memory. Yet even in the west, the dotty idea of ‘Uncle Joe’ lives on, a cartoon fantasy of Stalin’s underlying virtue: gruff, severe, but ultimately kindly. Someone you could talk to. Someone you could deal with.

I think differently, and I lay at the door of this sinister man not only the 20 million deaths that he directly ordained but also the atmosphere of fear in which everyone in the post-war generation, on either side of the ‘iron curtain’, grew up.
It is nearly 60 years since his death, so from this distance we can consider his nature and his acts, and close the book forever on the idea that he was in some way – in any way – a force for good. He was not. The fact that he presided over the extraordinary feat of the Soviets in vanquishing their German invaders is beside the point: the Soviet people and their military leaders deserve all the credit for this victory, won at such enormous cost in blood, destitution and misery. Stalin’s contribution was negligible at best, negative in any clear-eyed analysis.

He was brought up to be bad. His father was a drunk who beat his son – who knows why? – with a venom that would have him put behind bars today. His mother presumably loved Josef but also beat him. On one of Stalin’s rare visits during his ascendancy he is reported to have asked her why she had treated him so cruelly. The answer is not recorded. His parents evidently taught him to love no-one, to trust no-one and to believe that violence was a normal solution. He became suspicious, probably deranged. From the earliest days of his career he was noted for his administrative ability but also for deviousness, deceit and misanthropy. Even Lenin, on his deathbed, warned that Stalin was not to be trusted with power.

He may have understood something useful about the psyche of people crushed and trampled over the centuries by exploitative masters. He transferred his seminary ideology lock, stock and barrel to the Bolshevik revolutionary creed. Yet from day one, as a terrorist, he used precisely the techniques of the class-enemy to compel obedience from the people he pretended to liberate: comply or die.

Stalin posed as a man of culture, with a library which he prized and a close interest in the work of writers, composers and performing artists. Between signing death-warrants he would peruse scripts and demand minuscule alterations to bring the work in line with his own version of the communist credo. Soviet writers, composers and performers tended to adopt his suggestions: the alternative was a slow death from starvation and exposure in a labour camp – not just for the victims but also for their family and friends.

The same fate awaited anyone whom Stalin suspected might be an opponent, or just a thinker. To survive in Stalin’s Soviet Union you had to be a slave, invisible or lucky. His successive Cheka variants had quotas: they didn’t really care whether or not you were opposed to the regime, they simply needed people to kill. They would drag you from your bed at 4 am, beat you, extract a confession, then make you kneel in a corner while one of them shot you in the back of the neck. They were doing away with 200 innocent people a night during Stalin’s purges. He knew all about it; he signed the documents and kept lists, which he annotated with keen interest.

Stalin’s performance during the Second World War has been described as inspiring, forceful and visionary. It could also be described as lamentable. He purged the Soviet armed forces just as the Germans were planning Operation Barbarossa, thereby crippling his own country’s defences while convincing the enemy that they had nothing to worry about. He insisted that his pact with Hitler was gold-plated, even going so far as to order that a German defector, who gave details of the next day’s onslaught, should be shot. He dithered and interfered during the Germans’ lightning invasion of 1941, preventing his remaining generals from doing their work and having them executed when they failed to carry out his half-baked instructions.

The Soviet Union – or Russia, as it became known for propaganda purposes – only began to win when Stalin stepped back and let the generals organise military strategy. As the Soviet armies gradually overwhelmed the invaders – at incredible cost - Stalin preened himself on the international stage, establishing a creepy friendship with the dying Roosevelt, who was completely taken in. Churchill wasn’t: he had judged the Bolsheviks as malign in 1917 and had not changed his opinion. But his negotiating strength was undermined by allegiance to an obsolete empire, which in 1943 was both bankrupt and militarily irrelevant.

Khrushchev thought that Stalin became drugged by power; the more he had the more he wanted. His memoirs record Stalin as inflicting petty, school-room humiliations on his closest confederates: Khrushchev was made to drink vodka until he was hardly able to stand, then to dance like a bear and then to sit still while Stalin tapped out the ashes from his pipe on Khrushchev’s bald head. We may think it couldn’t have happened to a nicer man... but the incident gives us an insight into Stalin’s peculiarly malevolent personality.

He is famously quoted as saying that one death is a tragedy but a million is just a statistic. I don’t believe he felt one death was a tragedy at all: he refused to rescue his son, Yakov, from a German prison-camp, thereby condemning him to death; he may have murdered his own wife; he was happy to see his comrades – especially those from the early days – disappear into oblivion, show-trials and the Gulag. It seems that he took pleasure, of a hideous nature, in causing death and anguish. But on the plus side... well, there isn’t one.

His treatment of Czechoslovakia is infamous. He made a show of supporting Czech resistance against Hitler’s fabricated claims on the Sudeten region, but also made it conditional on France taking the first step – knowing that the French government of the day was paralysed. In 1945 he encouraged the Czechs to rise up against the Germans - knowing that the 1st Ukrainian Front was stalled around Ostrava and could offer no assistance. The result is recorded on countless memorials in Prague and elsewhere.

After the war Stalin watched as the Czechs elected a coalition government, with his communists in a strong position, though without a majority. He then pressed Gottwald to stage a coup, with the usual Soviet paraphernalia of pretend-trials, executions and secret police. His legacy in the Czech and Slovak lands, as it was everywhere else behind the ‘iron curtain’, was oppression, fear and lies; arbitrary control of every aspect of life by little men placed in positions of total authority. The reality of Soviet friendship later became apparent when Warsaw Pact tanks clattered into Prague.

Stalin died miserably: he suffered a stroke, alone, which robbed him of speech and bodily control. His minions were too frightened to call for help. The comrades eventually gathered round his incapacitated body. His daughter described his eyes as yellow with hate. We might approve of this tawdry end to an inhuman human being; on the other hand we might think of it as a statistic.

There is a saying that ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Josef Stalin is a warning from history: someone who gained absolute power and, sure enough, was absolutely corrupted by its possession.