According to a soon-to-be-published book, "Stalin’s Last Crime”, top members of the Politburo may have poisoned Stalin, the notoriously paranoid tyrant who saw enemies everywhere, and had them killed by the millions. Comrade Conspiracy getting snuffed out by a conspiracy of his subordinates is either rich irony or poetic justice. Take your pick. But the alleged motive of the suspected conspirators is breathtaking. The four top members of the Politburo, including shoe-banging, corn-obsessing Nikita Khruschev, slipped Joseph Vissarionovich an odorless rat poison, warfarin, during his last meal in order to avoid nuclear Armageddon with the US as well as another round of horrific purges.
A recent NYTimes article outlines how, back in the 1940’s Stalin had fabricated ‘The Doctor’s Plot’, which he, predictably, purported to be a vast conspiracy of doctors bent on murdering top Kremlin officials. When Stalin made the plot public, in the early 1950’s, he had inflated the already imaginary conspiracy to include Jews operating on orders from the US. In a previously secret report, it appears that Stalin was going to expand the conspiracy’s magnitude to include the US plotting to destroy Moscow with a nuclear weapon and then to invade Russia from the east. Stalin ordered the construction of numerous gulag prison camps for what surely would have been another wave of his genocidal internal terror campaign. He also mobilized Soviet Pacific military forces for what looked like the preparation for an external terror campaign that could have resulted in a nuclear war.
I have to say that this theory strikes me as very plausible. I’ve been thinking a lot about Stalin lately, especially as the US moves ever closer to war with Iraq in order to rid that country and the world of a brutal tyrant, who, by the way, idealizes Stalin. It always seemed inexplicable to me that Stalin didn’t use nuclear weapons. A man responsible for the execution, torture, and enslavement of millions of his own people, doesn’t seem like the kind of person to exercise restraint with weapons of mass destruction. (Considering that the deterrent of nuclear weapons is the death of millions of your own people.) As it turns out, it seems that he was just waiting for the right excuse to use them. When the right excuse failed to show up, he fabricated one. Which raises a terrific question: if Stalin’s underlings were too afraid to kill him, or unsuccessful like the 17 assassination attempts to kill Hitler, and the US knew that Stalin was going to kill many of his own people and potentially many American people, would a ‘preventive’ war with the Soviet Union been the right thing to do? Probably. But rat poison sure was a lot more efficient.
If we had gone to war with the Soviet Union and won (without incinerating the world), one thing I'm certain of, Russians wouldn't have welcomed a 'liberating' American Army with flowers and parades in Moscow, as Bush hopes Iraqis will do in Baghdad in a few weeks. As the saying goes, "Better the devil you know."
The Moscow News reports on a comparison of two surveys, conducted in 1990 and 2001 by the Russian Civil Service Academy Sociological Research Center. Of note is how Stalin has regained approval over the decade while Lenin has fallen.
1990 approval ratings for historical figures:
6% Joseph Stalin
74% Peter the Great
57 Vladimir Lenin
55% Georgy Zhukov
2001 approval ratings:
32.9% Joseph Stalin
90.2% Peter the Great
39.9% Vladimir Lenin
80.8% Georgy Zhukov