Updated
The “little father of peoples” marked and still marks the destiny of Russia. He was not paranoid, but perversely narcissistic.
From a difficult childhood to the top of the state With more than 30 million deaths to his credit, Stalin is the second greatest criminal of humanity behind Mao Zedong (50 to 80 million deaths according to the sources). He was born on December 21, 1879, under the name of Iossif Djougashvili, in Gori, in Georgia, in a very poor family (mother seamstress, father cobbler and alcoholic). He was 14 years old when his mother placed him with the seminarians so that he could become a priest. He will quickly hate these monks who watch, spy, interfere in people’s consciences, accuse and punish harshly – putting them in the dungeon of rigor –, to retain from them only their methods of repression. As a teenager, he is a violent gang leader.
Read also: Paris Match and Stalin, pages of history
Having joined the Marxist-Leninist camp in 1904, he specialized in armed bank robbery, racketeering and extortion in order to supply Party coffers. The Czar’s police arrested him and exiled him five times to Siberia, from where he escaped four times. In 1905, he met Lenin, who appreciated his methods and entrusted him with increasingly important responsibilities: member of the political bureau in 1912, then general secretary of the Central Committee in 1922, a key technical post. In 1908, he decided to call himself Stalin, “the man of steel”. However, the old Bolsheviks, who all observe themselves and covet the place of the great leader of the Red Revolution, do not see in him a rival, but a silent and politically insignificant man. They are wrong.
During the 1917 revolution, he stands aside, waiting to see who will win. When Lenin died in 1924, he was an essential member of the Party. He prevents the publication of the will of the leader, who prefers Trotsky to him. In five years, deceitful, cunning, unpredictable, he will eliminate one by one all the possible contenders for the supreme position, by obtaining their exile or by having them assassinated. In 1929, he was in power, established a totalitarian regime based on terror, and remained the absolute master of the USSR until his death by cerebral hemorrhage on March 5, 1953.
A relentless tyrant who ignores remorse The 1930s were those of the extermination of the kulaks, peasants opposed to the collectivization of the land (600,000 dead), of the famine deliberately provoked in Ukraine in 1932-1933 (4 to 6 million dead), of several genocides (Chechens, Ingushetians, Kazakhs or Poles and Koreans, killed because foreigners), of the Great Terror of 1937-1938 (execution of 750,000 “enemies of the people” and more than 1 million placed in camps), without counting the assassinations which he almost ordered daily.
How to understand such a man? In their notes, doctors Levine and Pletnev, doctors of the top leaders of the regime, speak of paranoid psychosis. The cult of Stalin’s personality, his permanent obsession with conspiracies directed against him, close to the delirium of persecution (to the point of arresting, shortly before his death, the doctors who treat him, but whom he mistrusts!), plead for this diagnosis. The remarkable work of the psychoanalyst Paul Fuks* on the “little father of the peoples” shows that he was above all a very structured narcissistic pervert having all the appearances of normality. Clearly, a psychotic who discharges his psychosis hidden by the destruction of others at the slightest fear or suspicion, even imaginary. This power soothes him, gives him pleasure.
Unlike the paranoid, who adheres totally to his ramblings, the pervert is aware of his lies, of the game he is playing and of the web he is weaving to trap others. Stalin launches false accusations, obtaining if necessary confessions under torture to justify the trials and the executions that he organizes. He perceives otherness as a threat, never as a complement or an enrichment. Friendship and love are hollow words for him. He has no advisers, only implementers. All live in fear. In a tone of mockery, he likes to threaten them with death or the gulag if they were to disappoint him and watches their reactions. He pits them against each other and pulls the strings. It encourages denunciation. He also likes to play with his prey: arrest, humiliation, promise of a pardon or even promotion, then finally torture and execution.
His second wife, who reproached him for his actions and whom he made suffer a lot, committed suicide with a bullet in the heart. He had no guilt. To become popular under Stalin, to dare to criticize, was to program his death and that of his family. In 1956, at the beginning of de-Stalinization, Nikita Khrushchev, his successor, denounced in a secret report a small part of his crimes and Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1985, their totality. Despite this and the gradual disintegration of the USSR (from 1953 to 1991), its Stalinist model of governance based on disinformation, propaganda, repression and absolute one-man rule persists. It was coupled with a crazy dream: to reconstitute the vanished Soviet empire!
* “Stalin, narcissistic pervert”, by Paul Fuks, ed. The Age of Man.