The Godfather, Part I: Stalin as a Boy
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When Josef Stalin finally succumbed to the stroke he so richly deserved, a distraught Pablo Neruda mourned the death of this “giant. … the noon, the maturity of man and the peoples.” Such attitudes are, mercifully, now rare. Once known genially as “Uncle Joe,” Stalin is now regularly reviled as a monster and a despot to be ranked with history’s worst.
Despite this, it continues to be the case that, in the popular imagination, the name Stalin fails to deliver anything like the sense of horror conjured up by Hitler. The reasons include the persistence of leftist ideology, the fact of cultural distance, and the recollection of wartime alliance. There’s something else, however, that should not be overlooked: Stalin the man is barely known, and what is thought to be known is that he was something of a plodder, a bureaucrat, the embodiment of Soviet drab: in other words, a bore. That’s not a quality humanity expects from its enduring villains: Just ask Shakespeare, just ask Milton.
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