Private Life of Stalin
STALIN IS GOOD LEADER
When I’m met Stalin, I did not find him enigmatic. I found him the easiest person to talk to I ever met. He is far and away the best Committee Chairman of my experience. He can bring everybody’s views out and combine them in the minimum of time.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 47
If I should explain Stalin to politicians, I should call him a superlatively good committee man. Is this too prosaic a term for the leader of 200 million people? I might call him instead a farseeing statesman; this also is true….
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 52
Stalin brings certain important qualities to these joint decisions. People who meet him are first of impressed by his directness and simplicity, his swift approach. Next they noticed his clearness and objectivity in handling questions. He completely lacks Hitler’s emotional hysteria and Mussolini cocky self-assertion; he does not thrust himself into the picture. Gradually one becomes aware of his keen analysis, his colossal knowledge, his grip of world politics, his willingness to face facts, an especially his long view, which fits the problem in the history, judging not only its immediate factors, but its past and future too.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 54
“I [A.L. Strong] was hardly conscious of the part played by Stalin in helping us to reach a decision. I thought of him rather as someone superlatively easy to explain things to, who got one’s meaning half through a sentence, and brought it all out very quickly. When everything became clear, and not a moment sooner or later, Stalin turned to the others: ‘Well?’ A word from one, a phrase from another, together accomplished a sentence. Nods–it was unanimous. It seemed we had all decided, simultaneously, unanimously. That is Stalin’s method and greatness. He is supreme analyst of situations, personalities, tendencies. Through his analysis he is supreme combiner of many wills. A creator of collective will–such is supposed to be every Communist, though by no means all of them measure up to this high calling. The greatness of the man is known by the range over which he can do this. “I can analyze and plan with the workers of one plant for a period of several months,” said a responsible Communist to me. “Others, much wiser than I, like men on our Central Committee, can plan with wider masses for years. Stalin is in this our ablest. He sees the interrelations of our path with world events, and the order of each step, as a man sees the earth from the stratosphere. But the men of our Central Committee take his analysis not because it is Stalin’s but because it is clear and convincing and documented with facts.”
When Stalin reports to a congress of the party, or of the farm champions, or the heads of industry, none of his statements can be ranked as new. They are statements heard already on the lips of millions throughout the land. But he puts them together more completely than anyone else. He analyzes them, shows the beginning, the end and all the stages to that end. He shows the farm champions the long, hard path to collective farming and just where they are on that path today. He shows the heads of industry what and why are the fundamental tasks in industry at the moment. He shows the party congress the chief tasks for the Soviet Union in the next few years. All of this he shows out of their own reports and knowledge, combining and relating these to the situation in the country and the world. It is not the statements or the policies that are new but the combining of them, so that they become a collective program, unanimously and understandingly adopted. It is for this capacity that men cheer Stalin….
Men never speak in the Soviet Union of “Stalin’s policy” but always of the “party line,” which Stalin “reports” in its present aspects, but does not “make.”
Strong, Anna Louise. Dictatorship and Democracy in the Soviet Union. New York: International Pamphlets, 1934, p. 17-18
What Lenin valued in Stalin was his knowledge of details and of persons, his working power and the swiftness of his decisions, qualities which only a supreme character would appreciate in a subordinate.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 71
Everyone knows about Stalin’s own revolutionary spirit and about his other virtues which have been cited by the party over and over again. His pretensions to a very special role in our history were well founded, for he really was a man of outstanding skill and intelligence. He truly did tower over everyone around him, and despite my implacable condemnation of his methods and his abuses of power, I have always recognized and acknowledged his strengths.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970. p. 4
[HOXHA STATED On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of great Marxist-Leninist Joseph Stalin]
All this villainy emerged soon after the death, or to be more precise, after the murder of Stalin. I say after the murder of Stalin, because Mikoyan himself told me and Mehmet Shehu that they, together with Khrushchev and their associates, had decided to carry out a “pokushenie”, i.e., to make an attempt on Stalin’s life, but later, as Mikoyan told us, they gave up this plan. It is a known fact that the Khrushchevites could hardly wait for Stalin to die. The circumstances of his death are not clear.
An unsolved enigma in this direction is the question of the “white smocks”, the trial conducted against the Kremlin doctors, who, as long as Stalin was alive were accused of having attempted to kill many leaders of the Soviet Union. After Stalin’s death these doctors were rehabilitated and no more was said about this question! But why was this question hushed up?! Was the criminal activity of these doctors proved at the time of the trial, or not? The question of the doctors was hushed up, because had it been investigated later, had it been gone into thoroughly, it would have brought to light a great deal of dirty linen, many crimes and plots that the concealed revisionists, with Khrushchev and Mikoyan at the head, had been perpetrating. This could be the explanation also for the sudden deaths within a very short time, of Gottwald, Bierut, Foster, Dimitrov and some others, all from curable illnesses, about which I have written in my unpublished memoirs, “The Khrushchevites and Us”. This could prove to be the true reason for the sudden death of Stalin, too. In order to attain their vile aims and to carry out their plans for the struggle against Marxism-Leninism and socialism, Khrushchev and his group liquidated many of the main leaders of the Comintern, one after the other, by silent and mysterious methods. Apart from others, they also attacked and discredited Rakosi, dismissed him from his post and interned him deep in the interior of the steppes of Russia, in this way. In the “secret” report delivered at their 20th Congress, Nikita Khrushchev and his associates threw mud at Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and tried to defile him in the filthiest manner, resorting to the most cynical Trotskyite methods. After compromising some of the cadres of the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Khrushchevites exploited them thoroughly and then kicked them out and liquidated them as anti-party elements. The Khrushchevites headed by Khrushchev, who condemned the cult of Stalin in order to cover up their subsequent crimes against the Soviet Union and socialism raised the cult of Khrushchev sky-high. Those top functionaries of the party and Soviet state attributed to Stalin the brutality, cunning perfidy and baseness of character, the imprisonments and murders which they themselves practised and which were second nature to them. As long as Stalin was alive it was precisely they who sang hymns of praise to him in order to cover up their careerism, and their underhand aims and actions. In 1949 Krushchev described Stalin as the “leader and teacher of genius”, and said that “the name of Comrade Stalin is the banner of all the victories of the Soviet people, the banner of the struggle of the working people the world over”. Mikoyan described the Works of Stalin as a “new, higher historical stage of Leninism”. Kosygin said, “We owe all our victories and successes, to the great Stalin”, etc., etc. While after his death they behaved quite differently. It was the Khrushchevites who strangled the voice of the party, strangled the voice of the working class and filled the concentration camps with patriots; it was they who released the dregs of treachery from prison, the Trotskyites and all the enemies, whom time and the facts had proved and have proved again now with their struggle as dissidents to be opponents of socialism and agents in the service of foreign capitalist enemies. It is the Khrushchovites who, in conspiratorial and mysterious ways, tried and condemned not only the Soviet revolutionaries but also many persons from other countries.
Khrushchev, Mikoyan and Suslov first defended the conspirator Imre Nagy, and then condemned and executed him secretly somewhere in Rumania! Who gave them the right to act in that way with a foreign citizen? Although he was a conspirator, he should have been subject only to trial in his own country and not to any foreign law, court or punishment. Stalin never did such things.
No, Stalin never acted in that way. He conducted public trials against the traitors to the party and Soviet state. The party and the Soviet peoples were told openly of the crimes they had committed. You never find in Stalin’s actions such Mafia-like methods as you find in the actions of the Soviet revisionist chiefs. The Soviet revisionists have used and are still using such methods against one another in their struggle for power, just as in every capitalist country. Khrushchev seized power through a putsch, and Brezhnev toppled him from the throne with a putsch.
Brezhnev and company got rid of Khrushchev to protect the revisionist policy and ideology from the discredit and exposure resulting from his crazy behaviour and actions and embarrassing buffoonery. He did not in any way reject Khrushchevism, the reports and decisions of the 20th and 22nd Congresses in which Khrushchevisrn is embodied. Brezhnev showed himself to be so ungrateful to Khrushchev, whom he had previously lauded so high, that he could not even find a hole in the wall of the Kremlin to put his ashes when he died!
Stalin was not at all what the enemies of communism accused and accuse him of being. On the contrary, he was just and a man of principle. He knew how to help and combat those who made mistakes, knew now to support, encourage and point out the special merits of those who served Marxism-Leninism loyally, as the occasion required. The question of Rokossovsky and that of Zhukov are now well known. When Rokossovsky and Zhukov made mistakes they were criticized and discharged from their posts. But they were not cast off as incorrigible. On the contrary, they were, warmly assisted and the moment it was considered that these cadres had corrected themselves, Stalin elevated them to responsible positions promoted them to marshals and at the time of the Great Patriotic War charged them with extremely important duties on the main fronts of the war against the Hitlerite invaders. Only a leader who had a clear concept of and applied Marxist-Leninist justice in evaluating the work of people, with their good points and errors, could have acted as Stalin did.
Following Stalin’s death, Marshal Zhukov became a tool of Nikita Khrushchev and his group; he supported the treacherous activity of Khrushchev against the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik Party and Stalin. Eventually, Nikita Khrushchev tossed Zhukov away like a squeezed lemon. He did the same with Rokossovsky and many other main cadres. Many Soviet communists were deceived by the demagogy of the Khrushchevite revisionist group and thought that after Stalin’s death the Soviet Union would become a real paradise, as the revisionist traitors started to trumpet. They declared with great pomp that in 1980 communism would be established in the Soviet Union!! But what happened? The opposite, and it could not be otherwise.
Khrushchev himself admitted to us that Stalin had said to them that they would sell out the Soviet Union to imperialism. And this is what happened in fact. What he said has proved true.
Any person who assesses Stalin’s work as a whole can understand that the genius and communist spirit of this outstanding personality are rare in the modern world.
Hoxha, Enver. With Stalin: Memoirs. Tirana: 8 N‘ntori Pub. House, 1979.
GOLOVANOV: I heard from Stalin many times and I say categorically that the way people live is the basis of everything….
Unless we have another Stalinist hand firmly on the helm, we won’t build communism. I hold that Stalin took the correct road and that we must continue this line.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 303
Stalin and Khrushchev. As for Khrushchev, he is not worth one of Stalin’s fingernails. Stalin’s achievements, despite everything, are enormous. He was the great transformer…. While they strive to efface his colossal achievements.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 364
The end of the war is still vivid in my memory as a glorious event that washed away all my doubts about the wisdom of Stalin’s leadership. All heroic and tragic events, losses and even purges, seemed to be justified by the triumph over Hitler. I remember the grand reception in the Kremlin where I had the privilege of being seated in the Georgian Hall at table No. 9 together with Admiral Isakov, deputy commander of the Navy…. I remember when Stalin came to our table to greet Isakov, who had lost a leg in a German air raid in the Caucasus in 1942, and pronounced a toast in his honor. Isakov could not appear before an audience on crutches, and we were all moved by Stalin’s gesture.
You must realize the emotion of every officer in the high command when Stalin admitted in his speech to us that mistakes were made and that we had been helpless in dreadful situations in the war. He said that another people and another nation would have asked the government to conclude a peace treaty with the Germans, but the Russian people had displayed confidence and patience in their government, and he thanked the Russian nation for that confidence.
Stalin was quite a different man that night from the one I had met in his Kremlin office. This time he displayed deep emotion, and it seemed to me that he looked at us young generals and admirals as the generation he had raised, his children and his heirs.
In retrospect, what is remarkable is that Stalin displayed such emotion and devoted such special attention to the mid-level military leaders who were much younger than Zhukov, Voroshilov, and others of the old guard. He was definitely addressing himself to my generation, which had come of age in the war, and we were thrilled to bask in his proud and approving glances in our direction.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 170
If Stalin had accomplished for the world bourgeoisie what he did for the world proletariat, he would have long been hailed in bourgeois circles as one of the “greats” of all time, not only of the present century. The same general criteria should apply to Stalin’s reputation from the Marxist point of view. Stalin advanced the position of the world proletariat further than any person in history with the exception of Lenin. True, without the base Lenin laid, Stalin could not have built, but using this base he moved about as far as was possible in the existing situation.
In short a new class of world leader has emerged, and Stalin is in its highest rank.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 120
His [Stalin] history is a series of victories over a series of tremendous difficulties. Since 1917, not a single year of his career has passed without his having done something which would have made any other man famous. He is a man of iron…. He is as strong and yet as flexible as steel. His power lies in his formidable intelligence, the breadth of his knowledge, the amazing orderliness of his mind, his passion for precision, his inexorable spirit of progress, the rapidity, sureness, and intensity of his decisions, and his constant care to choose the right men.
In many ways, as we have seen, he [Stalin] is extraordinarily like Lenin: he has the same knowledge of theory, the same practical common sense, the same firmness.
Among all the sources of his genius, which is the principal one? Bela Kun said, in a fine phrase: “He knows how not to go too quickly. He knows how to weigh the moment.” And Bela Kun considers that to be the chief characteristic of Stalin, the one which belongs to him in particular, much more than any other; to wait, to temporize, to resist alluring temptations and to be possessed of terrible patience. Is it not this power that has made Stalin, of all the Revolutionaries of history, the man who has most practically enriched the spirit of Revolution, and who has committed the fewest faults? He weighs the pros and cons and reflects a great deal before proposing anything (a great deal does not mean a long time). He is extremely circumspect and does not easily give his confidence. He said to one of his close associates, who distrusted a third party: “A reasonable amount of distrust is a good basis for collective work.” He is as prudent as a lion.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 275-276
Whoever you may be, the finest part of your destiny is in the hands of that other man [Stalin], who also watches over you, and who works for you–the man with a scholar’s mind, a workman’s face, and the dress of a private soldier.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 283
By the mid 1920s, Stalin’s main opponents would come to realize that this ‘outstanding mediocrity’ [to quote Trotsky] was an exceptional politician,…
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 108
Sklyansky knew Stalin well enough himself. He wanted my definition of Stalin and my explanation of his success. I thought for a minute.
“Stalin,” I said, “is the outstanding mediocrity in the party.”
Trotsky, Leon. My Life. Gloucester, Massachusetts: P. Smith, 1970, p. 512
Koba is cautious, but his is the caution of a statesman. He does not want to begin anything without being 100 percent certain of success. That is characteristic of him.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 127
But there was much more to him [Stalin]. He had the potential of a true leader. He was decisive, competent, confident, and ambitious. The choice of him rather than Zinoviev or Kamenev to head the charge against Trotsky at the 13th Party Conference showed that this was beginning to be understood by other Central Committee members.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 228
First Meeting of Hoxha with Stalin
July 1947
The attention with which he followed my explanations about our new economy and its course of development made a very deep impression on us. Both during the talk about these problems, and in all the other talks with him, one wonderful feature of his, among others, made an indelible impression on my mind: he never gave orders or sought to impose his opinion. He spoke, gave advice, made various proposals, but always added: This is my opinion, this is what we think. You, comrades, must judge and decide for yourselves, according to the concrete situation on the basis of your conditions.. His interest extended to every problem.
Hoxha, Enver. With Stalin: Memoirs. Tirana: 8 N‘ntori Pub. H
https://espressostalinist.com/the-real- ... of-stalin/
A whole lot more where this came from, quite a compendium