I hope I will be forgiven if I attempt a collective response to some of the points and challenges raised by my recent post on Josef Stalin.

To begin with the ‘statistics’: the figure of 20 million appears to be the consensus among professional historians. This includes victims of the collectivisation famines, people executed in the purges, people who died in the camps, people who died while being deported, and those who were simply killed or otherwise disappeared during Stalin’s three decades at the helm. It does not include casualties of the Civil War, the attack on Poland, the Spanish Civil War, the Finnish escapade or the Great Patriotic War. Figures as high as 40 million are sometimes quoted but these seem to be regarded by experts as inflated.

Yes, Mao is ‘credited’ with as many as 50 million victims, which would make him (easily) the leader in this league table. What sets both Stalin and Mao apart from other contenders – Attila, for instance – is that they disposed of unimaginable numbers of their own people.

Britain did indeed provide military support to Stalin following the Nazi invasion. Some 3,000 British sailors died on the Arctic convoys. Millions of tons of aircraft, tanks, trucks, guns, food and kit were shipped to Russia from British and American factories. This factor was erased from Soviet accounts of the war. Oddly enough, Britain was the first foreign country to recognise the Soviet Union (1924). The USA held out for another ten years.

Churchill’s integrity in this and other affairs of state has been questioned. His antipathy to Stalin (and vice versa) is a matter of record. He explained his apparent volte face by saying that, if Hitler invaded hell, he would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. Less witty is his notorious ‘back of an envelope’ division of post-war Europe into spheres of influence during a private discussion with Stalin, who allegedly ticked the sketch-map in blue pencil. Churchill took this to signify agreement; all it actually meant was that Stalin had read it. The story does neither man much credit. If we are charitable, we can probably say that Churchill was hoping to ensure free elections in Poland, whose independence was the proximate British casus belli. If we are Czech, we would probably not be charitable.

From the Czech point of view, Neville Chamberlain’s performance in Munich and Berlin must seem outrageous – as it does to many Britons. While Daladier knew exactly what was going on, and was mortified by the episode, Chamberlain imagined that his great personal gifts as a statesman had saved Europe from war. Churchill described him as ‘a pinhead’. Hitler was even less impressed: ‘If that man comes here again I will jump on his stomach’. His description of Czechoslovakia as a ‘far-away country of which we know nothing’ was deplored by many, if not most, Britons, including my parents. British readers may like to note that the highest-scoring fighter ace in the Battle of Britain was... Czech.

My contention that Stalin’s military contribution was negligible has been questioned. It is based on post-war accounts of surviving Soviet military leaders – whose point of view may well be biased – in which Stalin is accused of irresolution, strategic ignorance and meddling. Curiously, this is exactly the same charge which Hitler’s generals levelled at his military leadership post-1942 (likewise in post-war autobiographical accounts). On the other side of the coin, it is undeniable that Stalin’s drive for industrialisation (a hundred years in ten) gave the USSR the productive means to beat back the invader. Here again, we might ask: who were the real heroes in this enterprise? Possibly the men and women who laboured, suffered and often died in achieving the impossible.

The central paradox about Stalin’s military competence was that he seemed to do almost everything he could to render the Soviet Union vulnerable to attack from its erstwhile ally. It has been suggested, and not just by his admirers, that he was buying time (rather as Chamberlain’s defendants allege with reference to his sell-out in Munich). The question remains: would a pre-emptive attack by the Soviet Union have thwarted Hitler’s plans? Could the war on the Eastern Front have been averted, or some kind of condominium achieved, with the consequent saving of millions of lives? Probably not, but it is one of the more interesting ‘what-ifs’ of Second World War discussion.

The imperial policies of the British in the days of their Empire have been referred to, presumably on the basis that a pot is calling a kettle black. As far as I can tell, the inhabitants of the Empire who condemned Britain for exploiting other countries’ people and resources tended to refrain from condemning the way in which the exploitation was conducted. Judged by the generally accepted standards of the time, and with a number of exceptions, the British seem to have gone about their empire-building in a relatively humane manner. The subject has been examined in depth by Niall Ferguson and Jeremy Paxman, among others. The key conclusion seems to be that Britain used its military and naval force to facilitate trade above all other considerations – servants, rather than masters, of commercial interests. It has been observed that, in so doing, Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence of mind.

It has been pointed out by a correspondent that Stalin signed the death-warrants without emotion. He was a natural bureaucrat, so – melancholy though it seems - this is very likely to be the case. I had assumed that a man who took such evident pleasure in humiliating others would obtain real satisfaction from extinguishing them.

About accuracy: I am asked if the quotation... one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic... is authentic. I don’t know; it appears in a biography of Harold Truman and is said to have been Stalin’s response to Churchill’s prevarication on the timing of the Second Front. It does not appear, as the correspondent says, in any non-Western source.

I am reminded that the correct spelling of ‘vice-like grip’ is ‘vise-like grip’. True: this is one of the many differences between International English and British English. In British English the spelling is ‘vice’ for both the workshop implement and the opposite of virtue. This homonym gives rise to numerous English puns.

I would like to thank the correspondents who have taken issue with my opinion of Josef Stalin, the smaller number who have agreed with it, and those who have contributed a point of view. I would also like to thank Mr Stejskal for his interpolations.