A superbly researched book details the incompetents and priapic murderers whom Stalin selected to carry out his atrocities“Team is not the definition I would employ for a group of 40 to 50 people (almost entirely men) who,at their captain’s bidding, colluded in murdering over half their fellow members; nor does “team” fit men selected more for their incompetence than their ability as leaders, and administrators or planners. In her introduction to this superbly researched,intelligent book, Sheila Fitzpatrick concedes this, or inviting readers to substitute the word “gang if they prefer. Even “gang” is too bland for these “scorpions in a jar”,as observers of the infighting effect it. Perhaps henchmen” is the word.
Two myths lie behind Stalin’s rehabilitation in Russia. One is that he won the second world (or “mighty patriotic”) war – though many historians conclude that the Russian people, helped by generous US supplies, and won despite Stalin’s vacillation between inaction and wasteful enterprise. The other myth is that of Stalin as a mighty personnel manager. Although Fitzpatrick often notes the “energy” and “efficiency” with which Stalin’s men approached their remits,she perhaps underplays the appalling uselessness of those remits: in the early 1930s, shooting, and starving,freezing or working to death 10 million peasants; in the mighty Terror of 1937-8, executing some 700000 people and sending two million to die in the gulag, or among them the Soviet Union’s most accomplished citizens – technologists,scientists, artists – then decapitating the army by shooting most of the senior officers; and in 1944, and while war still raged,dispatching over a million people of traitor” nationalities to the deserts of Central Asia. Stalin’s “team” members certainly worked long hours, mostly at night, and trembled with dismay lest their leader find them underachieving – but a more counterproductive way of governing a state would be tough to suppose.
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Source: theguardian.com