Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich - interesting biography facts. Interesting facts about Stalin Interesting facts about Stalin and Hitler

Many interesting facts from Stalin’s life confirm the well-known idea of the leader, while others, on the contrary, reveal a new side to his person. Here we will look at 15 real facts about this difficult person that characterize him as an unconventional personality.

Stalin changed his own date of birth. During his studies, Stalin's fellow student, the occultist Gurdjieff, deduced from his horoscope that he would never become a great leader. Joseph Vissarionovich therefore changed his birthday from December 18 to December 21.
Stalin was very well-read and highly educated. By today's standards, he could have received his doctorate in philosophy at the age of thirty-two. This was greatly facilitated by a remarkable desire to read; he considered about three hundred pages of text to be the daily norm. They say that the leader’s personal library, which included exactly those volumes that he studied or was planning to study, amounted to several tens of thousands of volumes.
Stalin was a music lover. At the time of his death, there were over three thousand records in his personal music library, these were speeches by people such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and speeches by Joseph Vissarionovich himself, but others were musical. Among the latter were symphonies, operas and ballets, there was also popular (dance) music, as well as national anthems of different countries.
Had several physiological characteristics. These are fusion of two toes on the left foot, traumatic deformation of the left hand and short height (160 cm).
In his youth he was unambitious and self-critical. This is evidenced by the fact that during the first ten years of his service at the highest level of Soviet power, Joseph submitted his resignation three times.
He was a very thrifty and modest man in his clothes.. Joseph Vissarionovich did not have anything superfluous, everyone remembers him in military uniform, he often carried things around.
Did not use radical methods to combat drunkenness in the country. Stalin preferred to develop sports and interesting leisure activities for people, often in a forced form, but people went to stadiums, playgrounds and organized clubs. However, today this “obligation” is successfully applied by structures in different countries that are far from the ideas of a communist state.
Sometimes he drank alcohol, preferring wine and cognac. The first were, of course, the Georgian varieties “Tsinadeli” and “Telyani”. According to the guards, during the twenty-three years that Stalin was in the highest echelon of power, he was seen drunk only twice.
Stalin was a true fanatic of his people and an expert on national issues. When the leader’s contemporaries recall interesting facts about the war of 1941-1945, it often emerges that the commander-in-chief took into account national characteristics many times during the formation of individual military formations.
Valued personal territory. They say that it got to the point that in his own residence there was Joseph Vissarionovich’s personal coat rack, which no one dared to occupy even with a large number of guests.
Stalin always had a pistol at hand, and a loaded one at that. This showed the suspicion of the leader of the USSR, so famous among spiteful critics; his uniform always had a secret pocket for weapons, and in his office he put it in a drawer next to his workplace.
Love for your slippers. Joseph Vissarionovich took them with him everywhere and there is even a known case when, due to the turmoil, Stalin’s favorite slippers remained in Sochi, and they had to be taken on a special air flight.
I washed only in the shower using a special bench. It is interesting that the bathroom in which the leader of the peoples washed himself has remained unchanged to this day.
Stalin largely helped the emergence of a state like Israel. Once you start studying interesting facts about the Second World War, the creation of a Jewish country, as the sole merit of England and the USA, is logically called into question. Despite the fact that at the time of Joseph Vissarionovich’s death the Soviet Union and Israel were in severed diplomatic relations, in the country of Jews the day of Stalin’s death was declared national mourning.
Used folk remedies to treat radiculitis. If Joseph Vissarionovich had problems with his back, he always came to the kitchen with a stove and, using a wide board, heated it according to the folk method.

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1. Stalin's usual rate of reading literature was about 300 pages a day. He constantly educated himself. For example, while undergoing treatment in the Caucasus, in 1931, in a letter to Nadezhda Aliluyeva, having forgotten to inform about his health, he asks to send him textbooks on electrical engineering and ferrous metallurgy.

2. Stalin's level of education can be assessed by the number of books he read and studied. It is apparently impossible to establish how much he read in his life. He was not a collector of books - he did not collect them, but selected them, i.e. in his library there were only those books that he intended to somehow use in the future. But even those books that he selected are difficult to take into account. In his Kremlin apartment, the library contained, according to witnesses, several tens of thousands of volumes, but in 1941 this library was evacuated, and it is unknown how many books were returned from it, since the library in the Kremlin was not restored. Subsequently, his books were in the dachas, and an outbuilding was built in Nizhnyaya for a library. Stalin collected 20 thousand volumes for this library.

3. The range of education can be assessed from the following data: After his death, books with his notes were transferred from the library at the Blizhnaya Dacha to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. There were 5.5 thousand of them! In addition to dictionaries and several geography courses, this list included books by both ancient and modern historians: Herodotus, Xenophon, P. Vinogradov, R. Winner, I. Velyaminov, D. Ilovaisky, K.A. Ivanova, Herero, N. Kareeva, 12 volumes of “History of the Russian State” by Karamzin and the second edition of the six-volume “History of Russia from Ancient Times” by S.M. Solovyov (St. Petersburg, 1896). And also: the fifth volume of “History of the Russian Army and Navy” (St. Petersburg, 1912). "Essays on the history of natural science in excerpts from the original works of Dr. F. Dannsman" (St. Petersburg, 1897), "Memoirs of Prince Bismarck. (Thoughts and memories)" (St. Petersburg, 1899). A dozen issues of "Bulletin of Foreign Literature" for 1894, "Literary Notes" for 1892, "Scientific Review" for 1894, "Proceedings of the Lenin Public Library of the USSR", vol. 3 (M., 1934) with materials about Pushkin, P.V. Annenkov, I.S. Turgenev and A.V. Sukhovo-Kobylina, two pre-revolutionary editions of A. Bogdanov’s book “A Short Course in Economic Science”, a novel by V.I. Kryzhanovskaya (Rochester) “The Web” (St. Petersburg, 1908), G. Leonidze’s book “Stalin. Childhood and Adolescence” (Tbilisi, 1939. in Georgian), etc.

4. According to the currently existing criteria, Stalin was a Doctor of Philosophy in terms of the scientific results achieved back in 1920. His achievements in economics were even more brilliant and have not yet been surpassed by anyone.

5. Stalin's personal archive was destroyed shortly after his death.

6. Stalin always worked ahead of time, sometimes several decades ahead. His effectiveness as a leader was that he set very distant goals, and the decisions of today became part of large-scale plans.

7. Under Stalin, the country was in difficult conditions, but in the shortest possible time it sharply rushed forward, and this means that at that time there were a lot of smart people in the country. And this is true, since Stalin attached great importance to the minds of the citizens of the USSR. He was the smartest man, and he was sick of being surrounded by fools; he strove for the whole country to be smart. The basis for the mind, for creativity is knowledge. Knowledge about everything. And never so much has been done to provide people with knowledge, to develop their minds, as under Stalin.

8. Stalin did not fight with vodka, he fought for people’s free time. Amateur sports have been extremely developed, and specifically amateur sports. Each enterprise and institution had sports teams and athletes from among its employees. More or less large enterprises were required to have and maintain stadiums. Everyone played everything.

9. Stalin preferred only Tsinandali and Teliani wines. It happened that I drank cognac, but was simply not interested in vodka. From 1930 to 1953, the guards saw him “in zero gravity” only twice: at S.M.’s birthday. Shtemenko and at the funeral of A.A. Zhdanov.

10 .In all cities of the USSR, parks remained from Stalin’s time. They were originally intended for mass recreation of people. They had to have a reading room and game rooms (chess, billiards), a beer hall and ice cream parlours, a dance floor and summer theaters.

11 .Under Stalin, discussions were freely held on all the fundamental issues of existence: on the fundamentals of economics, social life, science. Weismann's genetics, Einstein's theory of relativity, cybernetics, the structure of collective farms were criticized, and any leadership of the country was severely criticized. It is enough to compare what satirists wrote about then and what they began to write about after the 20th Congress.

12. If the Stalinist planning system had been preserved and further rationally improved, and I.V. Stalin understood the need to improve the socialist economy (after all, it was not without reason that his work “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” appeared in 1952), if the task of further improving the standard of living of the people was put in first place (and in 1953 there were no obstacles to this ), by 1970 we would have been in the top three countries with the highest standard of living.

13. The economic backlog that Stalin created, his plans, the people he prepared (both technically and morally) were so outstanding that neither Khrushchev’s foolishness nor Brezhnev’s apathy could waste this resource.

14. During the first 10 years of being in the first echelons of power in the USSR, Stalin submitted his resignation three times.

15 .Stalin was similar to Lenin, but his fanaticism extended not to Marx, but to the specific Soviet people - Stalin fanatically served him.

16. In the ideological struggle against Stalin, the Trotskyists simply had no chance. When Stalin proposed to Trotsky in 1927 to hold an all-party discussion, the results of the final all-party referendum were stunning for the Trotskyists. Of the 854 thousand party members, 730 thousand voted, of which 724 thousand voted for Stalin’s position and 6 thousand for Trotsky.

17 .Stalin was the greatest expert and authority in the Bolshevik Party on the national issue.

18 Not the least role in the creation of the State of Israel was played by Stalin’s support in the vote on the resolution at the UN.

19 .Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with Israel only because something like a grenade was exploded on the territory of the USSR mission in Israel. Mission personnel were injured by this explosion. The Israeli government rushed to the USSR with an apology, but the Stalinist USSR did not forgive anyone for such an attitude towards itself.

20. Despite the severance of diplomatic relations, national mourning was declared in Israel on the day of Stalin's death.

21 In 1927, Stalin passed a decree that the dachas of party workers could not be larger than 3-4 rooms.

22 .Stalin treated both the security and the service personnel very well. Quite often he invited them to the table, and one day when he saw that the sentry at his post was getting wet in the rain, he ordered to immediately build a mushroom at this post. But this had nothing to do with their service. Here Stalin did not tolerate any concessions.

23. Stalin was very thrifty with himself - he did not have anything superfluous in clothes, but he wore out what he had.

24. During the war, Stalin, as expected, sent his sons to the front.

25. In the Battle of Kursk, Stalin found a way out of a hopeless situation: the Germans were going to use a “technical novelty” - the Tiger and Panther tanks, against which our artillery was powerless. Stalin remembered his support for the development of the A-IX-2 explosive and the new experimental PTAB aerial bombs, and gave the task: by May 15, i.e. by the time the roads dry out, produce 800 thousand of these bombs. 150 factories of the Soviet Union rushed to fulfill this order and fulfilled it. As a result, near Kursk, the German army was deprived of striking power by Stalin’s tactical novelty - the PTAB-2.5-1.5 bomb.

26. After the war, Stalin gradually reduced the role of the Politburo to a body for the leadership of the party. And at the 19th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, this abolition of the Politburo was recorded in the new charter.

27. Stalin said that he saw the party as an order of sword-bearers, numbering 50 thousand people.

28. Stalin wanted to remove the party from power altogether, leaving only two matters in the party’s care: agitation and propaganda and participation in the selection of personnel.

29. Stalin said his famous phrase “personnel decide everything” in 1935 at a reception in honor of graduates of military academies: “We talk too much about the merits of leaders, about the merits of leaders. They are credited with everything, almost all of our achievements. This, of course, is wrong and wrong. It's not just about the leaders... To set technology in motion and use it to the bottom, we need people who have mastered the technology, we need personnel capable of mastering and using this technology according to all the rules of art... That's why the old slogan<техника решает все>... must now be replaced by a new slogan, the slogan that<кадры решают все>".

30. In 1943, Stalin said: “I know that after my death a heap of rubbish will be placed on my grave, but the winds of history will mercilessly scatter it!”

Joseph Vissarionovich was born into a poor family, whose father was a shoemaker. Since childhood, he has seen no justice between rich and poor. Joseph Stalin's mother was often pregnant, but only he remained alive. As a child, Stalin was a smart and capable boy; he graduated from school with honors. This purposeful boy achieved everything on his own. He became the greatest ruler of all times.

Ruled the country from 1922 to March 1953. The image of the father of the people was erected around his personality. Books were written about him, his portraits were depicted on stamps and posters. This man has a very rich biography, in which you can find amazing facts from his life.

As a child, Stalin's parents prepared him to enter the theological conservatory.

He was not Russian, but Georgian. His real name is Dzhugashvili. But he could not go there because he did not know Russian. The priest's children took charge of his education, and he entered the conservatory, but not in the first grade, but immediately in the second. Later he enters the theological seminary and practically becomes a priest with a higher education. But he is expelled from the seminary, he studies in a circle of revolutionaries, and after a while he heads it.

Stalin was a very educated man

The daily norm of his reading was about 300 pages. His library contained many books, but only those that he expected to somehow use in the future. Joseph Vissarionovich’s love of reading is proven by the fact that when he left for treatment in the Caucasus, in his letter to Nadezhda he forgot to tell about his health, but asks to send his books on ferrous metallurgy.

Stalin's fears

Even the greatest people on earth have their own fears with which they live their entire lives. In the same way, the great ruler of the state, Stalin, experienced many fears that even those closest to him had no idea about. In the last years of Stalin's rule, both world politicians and ordinary citizens had no doubt that all important issues were resolved in the Kremlin. But in fact, this was not the case.

No one except Stalin's closest people knew that all decisions were made at a modest dacha in Kuntsevo, where until recent years the aging dictator lived and worked. What does Stalin’s house tell us about, first of all, about fear, everything here is saturated with it. This is not only the fear of the people who came here to Joseph Vissarionovich, but also his own Stalinist fear.

Who was the tenant of this state-owned house afraid of, from whom was he hiding? From the people or from myself? But you can’t hide from yourself, just like you can’t hide from your own fears. Stalin experienced many illnesses in the post-war years. In the fall of 1945, he suffered a stroke, and then a number of other complications followed. This exacerbated his already pathological suspicion and foreign agents began to seem to him everywhere. Stalin was always in fear, and even his house was painted dark green so that it would not be visible from satellites. His other fear was that he would be overthrown.

Stalin studied the history of the First World War very well, he remembers who the Decembrists were. These are people who decided to carry out a coup d'etat and deprive the ruler of power. Stalin remembers very well how he once seized power by removing the sick Lenin. Now he himself is in a similar situation, old and sick, but he is not Lenin, it won’t work out that easily with him. He will be able to get ahead of his enemies as soon as he feels that they are ready to attack.

Professor Vinogradov, personal physician of Joseph Stalin, once again, visiting his patient, had the imprudence to write recommendations in his medical record, in which he advised him to rest more and load himself less with work. Stalin remembered how Lenin was treated under his supervision, and considered this to be some kind of state conspiracy against the Vinogradov family, and wrote: “In Shackles.”

Personal life of Stalin

Stalin's personal life is also full of surprises and dark moments. His first wife, Keto Svanidze, managed to live with him for only a year, after which she died of tuberculosis. During the funeral of his wife, Stalin's mind became clouded and when the coffin with Keto was lowered into the grave, he jumped into it. In 1938, Stalin began an affair with Nadezhda Alliluyeva, a 16-year-old girl. In 1919, the couple formalized their relationship, but they were unhappy. Nadezhda Alliluyeva had 10 abortions. On the night of November 8–9, 1932, Nadezhda committed suicide by shooting herself in the heart. According to the testimony of Svetlana’s daughter, the reason for this was constant quarrels between the spouses.

Loneliness

Despite the fact that Stalin was a great man, he was lonely. There are many servants nearby who swear loyalty, but in reality there is no love in their eyes. The most humiliating thing is that Stalin is forced to use their services. Strangers are preparing his bath, hanging his clothes on hangers, probably thinking about his wretchedness. If only the wife, a loved one, did this, and perhaps the daughter would come. She would sit at the table with him for a common meal, and then a lonely breakfast would not be so unbearable. But daughter Svetlana is in no hurry to visit her father; he has no one to love, but he has more than enough hatred. Gathering people from his circle for daily evening gatherings around a large table, Stalin peers into everyone’s faces, analyzing and studying and not trusting anyone.

Stalin had a lot of external defects

He had fused second and third toes on his left foot. As a child, he suffered from smallpox, and its traces remained on his face. He always ordered all his images and photographs to be processed so that scars from the disease were not visible. Joseph Vissarionovich was a short man, just over 160 centimeters. As a child, Stalin received a severe injury to his left arm, which did not fully extend at the elbow and outwardly seemed shorter. Because of this, he was declared unfit for service in 1916.

Criminal record

On one of the hot days of July 1908, Stalin and his accomplice planned a robbery. It went down in the history of the 20th century as the most daring and successful. Two, under the guise of police officers, demanded passes to the deck of the ship for inspection. This armed ship carried a huge amount of Azerbaijani state money. The police turned out to be criminals in disguise, and then everything was like an action movie script.

The ship's guards came under fire, Stalin and Zhukov entered the cabin where there was a safe with money. Ended up in the hands of criminals 1200000 rubles, this is an absolutely huge amount for that time. Throughout his life, Joseph Vissarionovich was convicted of theft 8 times.

This life was born hopelessly. An illegitimate son assigned to a seedy drunkard shoemaker. Uneducated mother. Little Coco didn't get out of the puddles near Queen Tamara's hill. [Cm. article Stalin's Parents and Family.] Not just to become the ruler of the world, but how can this child get out of the lowest, most humiliated position?

Nevertheless, the culprit of his life bothered him, and, bypassing church regulations, they accepted the boy from a non-clerical family - first to a theological school, then even to a seminary.

From the heights of the darkened iconostasis, the God of Hosts sternly called to the new novice, spread out on the cold stone slabs. Oh, with what zeal the boy began to serve God! how I trusted him! During his six years of study, he hammered home the Old and New Testaments, the Lives of Saints and church history, and diligently served at liturgies.

Here, in the “Biography”, there is this photograph: a graduate of the theological school Dzhugashvili in a gray cassock with a round closed collar; matte, as if exhausted by prayers, the adolescent oval of the face; his long hair, prepared for the priestly service, is strictly combed, humbly anointed with lamp oil and let down over his ears - and only his eyes and tense eyebrows betray that this novice will probably go to the metropolitan.

Stalin while studying at the theological seminary

And God deceived... The sleepy, hateful town among the round green hills, in the windings of Medjuda and Liakhvi, fell behind: in noisy Tiflis, smart people had long been laughing at God. And the ladder that Coco tenaciously climbed led, it turns out, not to heaven, but to the attic.

But the seething bully age demanded action! Time was running out - nothing was done! There was no money for a university, for civil service, for starting a trade - but there was socialism that accepted everyone, socialism that was accustomed to seminarians. There was no inclination towards the sciences or the arts, there was no skill in crafts or theft, there was no luck in becoming the lover of a rich lady - but she called everyone with open arms, accepted and promised everyone a place - the Revolution.

Joseph Dzhugashvili. Photo from 1896

Here, in the “Biography,” he advised including a photo from this time, his favorite shot. Here he is, almost in profile. He doesn’t have a beard, a mustache, or sideburns (he hasn’t decided what yet), but simply hasn’t shaved for a long time, and everything is picturesquely overgrown with lush male growth. He is all ready to rush, but does not know where. What a sweet young man! An open, intelligent, energetic face, not a trace of that fanatical novice. Freed from oil, the hair perked up, adorned the head in thick waves and, swaying, covered what may have been somewhat unsuccessful in it: the forehead was low and sloping back. The young man is poor, his jacket was bought second-hand, a cheap checkered scarf fits his neck with artistic license and covers his narrow, painful chest, where there is no shirt. Isn’t this Tiflis plebeian already doomed to tuberculosis?

Every time Stalin looks at this photograph, his heart is filled with pity (for there are no hearts that are completely incapable of it).

How difficult everything is, how everything is against this glorious young man, huddled in a free cold closet at the observatory and already expelled from the seminary!

(He wanted to combine both for insurance; he went to Social Democratic circles for four years and continued to pray and interpret the catechism for four years - but they still expelled him.) For eleven years he bowed and prayed - in vain, he cried for lost time... The more decisively he shifted his youth to the Revolution!

And the Revolution also deceived... And what kind of revolution was that - the Tiflis one, a game of boastful self-conceit in cellars over wine? Here you will disappear, in this anthill of nonentities: no proper promotion through the steps, no seniority, but who will talk to whom. The former seminarian hates these talkers more bitterly than governors and policemen. (Why be angry with those? They serve honestly for a salary and naturally must defend themselves, but there can be no excuse for these upstarts!) Revolution? among Georgian shopkeepers? - will never! And he lost the seminary, lost the right path of life.

And to hell with this revolution, in some kind of poverty, in workers drinking away their pay, in some sick old women, in someone’s underpaid pennies? - why should he love them, and not himself, young, smart, beautiful and - bypassed?

Only in Batum, for the first time leading along the street about two hundred people, counting onlookers, Koba (that was his nickname now) felt the germination of grains and the power of power. People followed him! – Koba tried it, and he could never forget the taste. This was the only thing that suited him in life, this was the one life he could understand: you say - and people should do it, you indicate - and people should go. There is nothing better than this, higher than this. This is beyond wealth.

A month later, the police changed their minds and arrested him. Nobody was afraid of arrests then: what a deal! They’ll keep you for two months, then you’ll be released, and you’ll be a sufferer. Koba handled himself well in the common cell and encouraged others to despise their jailers.

But they grabbed him. All his cellmates were replaced, and he sat. What did he do? No one was punished like that for trivial demonstrations.

Passed year! - and he was transferred to the Kutaisi prison, to a dark, damp cell. Here he lost heart: life went on, but he not only did not rise, but descended lower and lower. He coughed painfully from the prison dampness. And even more justly he hated these professional loudmouths, the darlings of life: why is the revolution so easy for them, why are they not kept for so long?

Meanwhile, a gendarmerie officer, already familiar from Batum, arrived at the Kutaisi prison. Well, have you thought enough, Dzhugashvili? This is just the beginning, Dzhugashvili. We will keep you here until you rot from consumption or correct your behavior. We want to save you and your soul. You were there five minutes before, priest, Father Joseph! Why did you join this pack? You are a random person among them. Say you're sorry.

He really was sorry, how sorry he was! His second spring in prison was ending, his second prison summer was dragging on. Oh, why did he give up his modest spiritual service?

How in a hurry he was!.. The most unbridled imagination could not imagine a revolution in Russia earlier than in fifty years, when Joseph would be seventy-three years old... Why would he need a revolution then?

Yes, not only for this reason. But Joseph had already studied himself and recognized his unhurried character, his solid character, his love for strength and order. So it was precisely on solidity, on slowness, on strength and order that the Russian Empire stood, and why was it necessary to shake it?

And the officer with the wheat mustache came and came. (Joseph really liked his clean gendarme uniform with beautiful shoulder straps, neat buttons, piping, and buckles.) In the end, what I am offering you is public service. (Iosif would have been irrevocably ready to go into government service, but he spoiled things for himself in Tiflis and Batum.) You will receive support from us. At first you will help us among the revolutionaries. Choose the most extreme direction. Among them – move forward. We will treat you with care wherever we go. You will give us your messages in such a way that it does not cast a shadow on you. What nickname will we choose?.. And now, in order not to expose you, we are transporting you to a distant exile, and you leave from there right away, that’s what everyone does.

And Dzhugashvili decided! And he placed the third bet of his youth on the secret police!

In November he was deported to the Irkutsk province. There, among the exiles, he read a letter from a certain Lenin, known from Iskra. Lenin had broken away to the very edge, now he was looking for supporters, sending out letters. Obviously, he should have joined him.

Joseph left the terrible Irkutsk cold for Christmas, and even before the start Japanese war I was in the sunny Caucasus.

Now a long period of impunity began for him: he met with underground members, wrote leaflets, called to rallies - others were arrested (especially those he did not like), but he was not recognized, he was not caught. And they didn’t take me to war.

And suddenly! - no one expected it so quickly, no one prepared it, organized it - but She came! Crowds went around St. Petersburg with a political petition, great princes and nobles were killed, Ivano-Voznesensk went on strike, Lodz rebelled, “ Potemkin“- and the manifesto was quickly squeezed out of the Tsar’s throat, and still the machine guns on Presnya were still knocking and the railways froze.

Koba was amazed and stunned. Was he wrong again? Why can't he see anything ahead?

The secret police deceived him!.. His third bet was beaten! Oh, if only we could give him back his free revolutionary soul! What kind of hopeless ring is this? - to shake the revolution out of Russia, so that on its second day your reports will be shaken out of the secret police archives?

Not only was his will not steel then, but it completely split in two, he lost himself and saw no way out.

Young Joseph Stalin. Photo from 1908

However, they shot, made some noise, hung themselves up, looked around - where is that revolution? She's gone!

At this time, the Bolsheviks adopted a good revolutionary method of expropriation. Any Armenian moneybag was given a letter asking him to bring ten, fifteen, twenty-five thousand. And the moneybags brought it so that they wouldn’t blow up his shop or kill his children. It was a method of struggle - such a method of struggle! - not scholasticism, not leaflets and demonstrations, but real revolutionary action. The clean-cut Mensheviks grumbled that robbery and terror were contrary to Marxism. Oh, how Koba mocked them, oh, he drove them away like cockroaches, that’s why Lenin called him “a wonderful Georgian”! - exes are robbery, but revolution is not robbery? ah, varnished purists! Where does the money come from for the party, and where does it come from for the revolutionaries themselves? A bird in the hands is better than a pie in the sky.

Of the entire revolution, Koba especially fell in love with the exes. And here no one except Koba knew how to find those only faithful people, like Camo who will obey him, who will shake his revolver, who will take away the bag of gold and bring it to Koba on a completely different street, without coercion. And when they raked out 340 thousand in gold from the forwarders of the Tiflis bank - so this was still a proletarian revolution on a small scale, and fools are waiting for another, big revolution.

And the police did not know this about Kobe, and such a pleasant average line between the revolution and the police still remained. He always had money.

And the revolution already took him on European trains, sea ships, showed him islands, canals, medieval castles. It was no longer a stinking Kutaisi cell! In Tammerfors, Stockholm, London, Koba looked closely at the Bolsheviks, at the obsessed Lenin. Then in Baku I breathed in the vapors of this underground liquid, boiling black anger.

Vladimir Lenin. Pre-revolutionary photo

And they took care of him. The older and more famous he became in the party, the closer he was exiled, no longer to Baikal, but to Solvychegodsk, and not for three years, but for two. Between the links they did not interfere with the revolution. Finally, after three Siberian and Ural exiles, he, an implacable, tireless rebel, was driven... to the city of Vologda, where he settled in a policeman’s apartment and could travel by train to St. Petersburg in one night.

But on a February evening in nine hundred and twelve, his younger Baku comrade Ordzhonikidze came to him in Vologda from Prague, shook him by the shoulders and shouted:

"Coco! Coco! You have been co-opted into the Central Committee!”

On that moonlit night, swirling with frosty fog, thirty-two-year-old Koba, wrapped in a doha, walked for a long time around the yard. Again he hesitated. Member of the Central Committee!

After all, here Malinovsky- member of the Bolshevik Central Committee - and deputy of the State Duma. Well, let Lenin especially love Malinovsky. But this is under the Tsar! And after the revolution, today’s member of the Central Committee is a faithful minister. True, don’t expect any revolution now, not in our lifetime. But even without a revolution, a member of the Central Committee is some kind of power. What will he do in the secret police service? Not a member of the Central Committee, but a small spy. No, we must part with the gendarmerie.

Fate Azef like a giant ghost swayed over his every day, over his every night.

In the morning they went to the station and went to St. Petersburg. They were captured there.

Joseph Stalin. Photo from 1912

The young, inexperienced Ordzhonikidze was given three years in the Shlisselburg fortress and then additional exile. Stalin, as usual, was given only exile, three years. True, it’s a bit far away - Narym region, this is like a warning. But communication routes in the Russian Empire were well established, and at the end of the summer Stalin returned safely to St. Petersburg.

Now he has shifted the pressure to party work. I went to see Lenin in Krakow (it was not difficult for an exile). There's a printing house, there's a May rally, there's a leaflet - and at the Kalashnikov Exchange, at a party, they busted him (Malinovsky, but this was learned much later). The Okhrana got angry - and now they drove him into real exile - under the Arctic Circle, in Kureyka's pen. And they gave him a sentence - the tsarist government knew how to create merciless sentences! – four years, it’s scary to say.

And again Stalin hesitated: for what, for whom, did he refuse a moderate, prosperous life, from the protection of the authorities, and allow himself to be sent to this damn hole? “Member of the Central Committee” is a word for a fool. There were several hundred exiles from all the parties, but Stalin looked at them and was horrified: what a vile breed these professional revolutionaries are - firebrands, wheezes, dependent, insolvent. It wasn’t even the Arctic Circle that Caucasian Stalin was afraid of, but being in the company of these lightweight, unstable, irresponsible, negative people. And in order to immediately separate himself from them, disconnect him - yes, it would be easier for him among the bears! - he married a Cheldonian woman with a body like a mammoth, and a squeaky voice - but it’s better to have her “hee-hee-hee” and a kitchen with stinking fat than go to those meetings, disputes, scrapes and comradely courts. Stalin made it clear to them that they were strangers, cut himself off from them all and from the revolution too. Enough! It’s not too late to start an honest life even at thirty-five; at some point you have to stop running around in the wind, pockets like sails. (He despised himself for having spent so many years messing around with these clickers.) So he lived, completely separately, did not touch either the Bolsheviks or the anarchists, they moved on. Now he was not going to run away, he was going to honestly serve his exile to the end. Yes and war began, and only here, in exile, could he save his life. He sat with his chick, hiding; they had a son. But the war never ended. Use your fingernails or teeth to stretch out an extra year of exile—this weak king couldn’t even give real deadlines!

No, the war did not end! And from the police department, with which he had become so accustomed, his card and his soul were handed over to the military commander, and he, knowing nothing about Social Democrats or members of the Central Committee, called up Joseph Dzhugashvili, born in 1879, who had not previously served military service , – into the Russian Imperial Army as a private. This is how the future great marshal began his military career. He had already tried three services, the fourth was about to begin.

He was taken on a sleepy sled along the Yenisei to Krasnoyarsk, from there to the barracks in Achinsk. He was thirty-eight years old, and he was nothing, a Georgian soldier, huddled in an overcoat from the Siberian frosts and being carried as cannon fodder to the front. And his whole great life was to end near some Belarusian farm or Jewish town.

But he had not yet learned how to roll up an overcoat roll and load a rifle (later he did not know either a commissar or a marshal, and it was inconvenient to ask), when telegraph tapes arrived from Petrograd, from which strangers hugged each other in the streets and shouted in the frosty breath: “Christ risen!" The king - abdicated! The Empire was no more!

How? Where? And they forgot to hope and gave up counting. Joseph was taught correctly in his childhood: “Thy ways are mysterious, O Lord!”

I can’t remember when Russian society, all its party shades, had such unanimous fun. But for Stalin to rejoice, another telegram was needed, without it the ghost of Azef, like a hanged man, kept swinging overhead.

And a day later that dispatch came: The security department was burned and destroyed, all documents were destroyed!

The revolutionaries knew that they had to burn them quickly. There, probably, as Stalin realized, there were many like him, many like him...

(The security guard burned down, but for the rest of his life Stalin looked askance and looked around. With his own hands he leafed through tens of thousands of archival sheets and threw entire folders into the fire without looking through. And yet he missed it, it almost opened in the thirty-seventh. And every fellow party member who was later given up brought to trial, Stalin certainly accused Stalin of being an informer: he learned how easy it is to fall, and it was difficult for him to imagine that others would not be insured too.) February Revolution Stalin later refused the title of great, but he forgot how he himself rejoiced and sang, and flew on wings from Achinsk (now he could desert!), and did stupid things and through some provincial window sent a telegram to Lenin in Switzerland.

He arrived in Petrograd and immediately agreed with Kamenev: this is what we dreamed about in the underground. The revolution has been accomplished, now we need to strengthen what has been achieved. The time has come for positive people (especially if you are already a member of the Central Committee). All forces to support the provisional government!

So everything was clear to them until this adventurer arrived, not knowing Russia, deprived of any positive uniform experience, and, choking, twitching and burbling, he climbed with his April theses, completely confused everything! And finally he spoke to the party, dragged it to July coup!

This adventure failed, as Stalin correctly predicted, and the entire party almost died. And where has the rooster courage of this hero gone now?

He fled to Razliv, saving his skin, and the Bolsheviks were being smeared with the latest curses. Was his freedom really more valuable than the authority of the party? Stalin openly expressed this to them at Sixth Congress, but did not gather the majority.

In general, the seventeenth year was an unpleasant year: there were too many rallies, the one who lies the best is carried around, Trotsky never left the circus. And where did they come from, the talkative talkers, like flies to honey? We didn’t see them in exile, we didn’t see them on exiles, we hung around abroad, and then they came to rip people’s throats and get into the front seat. And they judge everything like fast fleas. The question hasn’t even arisen in life, hasn’t been posed – they already know how to answer! They laughed offensively at Stalin and didn’t even hide it. Okay, Stalin didn’t get involved in their disputes, and he didn’t get into the stands, he kept quiet for now. Stalin didn’t like this, he didn’t know how to throw out words in a race to see who was bigger and louder. This is not how he imagined the revolution. He envisioned the revolution: taking leadership positions and getting things done.

These pointy beards laughed at him, but why did they decide to blame everything difficult, everything thankless, on Stalin? They laughed at him, but why did everyone in the Kshesinskaya palace get sick with their stomachs and send no one else to Petropavlovka, namely Stalin, when it was necessary to convince the sailors to give up the fortress to Kerensky without a fight, and leave for Kronstadt again? Because the sailors would have thrown stones at Grishka Zinoviev. Because you need to be able to talk with the Russian people.

It was an adventure October revolution, but it was a success, okay. It was a success.

Fine. For this we can give Lenin an A. What will happen next is unknown, but for now it’s good. People's Commissariat? Okay, let it be. Draw up a constitution?

OK. Stalin took a closer look.

Surprisingly, it seemed that the revolution was completely successful in one year. It was impossible to expect this - but it was a success! This clown, Trotsky, also believed in world revolution, Treaty of Brest-Litovsk didn’t want to, and Lenin believed it, ah, book dreamers! You have to be an ass - to believe in the European revolution, how long have you lived there - you didn’t understand anything, Stalin drove through once - he understood everything. Here you need to cross yourself, that yours was a success. And sit quietly.

Think.

Stalin looked around with sober, unbiased eyes. And I thought about it. And I clearly understood that these phrase-mongers would ruin such an important revolution. And only he alone, Stalin, can guide it correctly. By honor, by conscience, he was the only real leader here. He impartially compared himself with these playwrights, jumpers, and clearly saw his superiority in life, their fragility, his stability. He differed from all of them in that understood people. He understood them there, where they connect with the earth, where basis, in that place I understood them, without which they do not stand, will not stand, and what is higher, what they pretend to do, what they show off - this is superstructure, doesn't solve anything.

It’s true, Lenin had an eagle flight, he could simply surprise: in one night he turned - “the land to the peasants!” (and then we’ll see), one day he came up with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (after all, it’s not like it hurts a Russian, even a Georgian, to give up half of Russia to the Germans, but it doesn’t hurt him!). Oh NEP don’t say it at all, this is the trickiest thing of all, it’s not a shame to learn such maneuvers.

What was above all in Lenin, super-remarkable: he held real power very tightly only in his own hands. Slogans changed, topics of discussion changed, allies and opponents changed, but complete power remained only in one’s own hands!

But there was no real reliability in this man; he faced a lot of grief with his household, getting entangled in it. Stalin correctly sensed in Lenin flimsiness, flamboyance, and finally a poor understanding of people, no understanding at all. (He checked this on his own: whichever side he wanted, he turned, and from this side only Lenin saw him.) For the dark hand-to-hand combat that is true politics, this man was not suitable. Stalin felt himself more stable and firmer than Lenin, as much as sixty-six degrees of Turukhansk latitude is stronger than fifty-four degrees of Shushenskoye. And what did this book theorist experience in life? He did not go through low rank, humiliation, poverty, direct hunger: even though he was a poor man, he was a landowner.

He never left exile, he was so exemplary! He hasn’t seen real prisons, he hasn’t even seen Russia itself, he spent fourteen years hanging around in exile. What he wrote, Stalin didn’t read more than half of it, he didn’t expect to become smart. (Well, he also had wonderful formulations. For example: “What is a dictatorship? Unlimited government, not restrained by laws.” Stalin wrote in the margins: “Good!”) Yes, if Lenin had a real sober mind, he would have been from the first days Stalin came closest, he would have said: “Help! I understand politics, I understand classes, I don’t understand living people!” But he couldn’t think of a better way to send Stalin as some kind of grain commissioner, somewhere in a corner of Russia. The person he needed most in Moscow was Stalin, and he Tsaritsyn sent...

And for the whole Civil Lenin settled down to sit in the Kremlin, he took care of himself. And Stalin had to wander for three years, driving around the whole country, sometimes shaking on horseback, sometimes in a cart, and freezing, and warming himself by the fire. Well, it’s true that Stalin loved himself during these years: like a young general without a rank, all fit and slender; leather cap with an asterisk; The officer's overcoat is double-breasted, soft, with a cavalry cut - and not buttoned; chrome boots, tailored to fit the foot; the face is smart, young, clean-shaven, and only a molded mustache, not a single woman can resist (and his third wife is a beauty).

Of course, he didn’t pick up a saber and didn’t get in front of bullets, he was more valuable to the Revolution, he’s not a man Budyonny. And when you come to a new place - to Tsaritsyn, to Perm, to Petrograd - you will be silent, ask questions, straighten your mustache. On one list you write “shoot”, on another list you write “shoot” - then people really start to respect you.

And to tell the truth, he showed himself to be a great military man, as the creator of victory.

This whole gang that climbed to the top, surrounded Lenin, fought for power, they all presented themselves as very smart, and very subtle, and very complex. It was their complexity that they boasted about. Where two and two made four, they muttered in unison that there was one more tenth and two hundredths. But the worst of all, but the nastiest of all, was Trotsky. It’s just that Stalin had never met such a vile person in his entire life. With such mad conceit, with such pretensions to eloquence, but never honestly argued, he never had “yes” - so “yes”, “no” - so “no”, necessarily: and so - and so, neither so - no way! No peace to be made, no war to wage - what reasonable person can understand this? What about arrogance? Like the Tsar himself, he bounced around in the salon carriage. But where do you get into the leadership if you don’t have a strategic streak?

This Trotsky burned and baked so much that at first, in the fight against him, Stalin lost his temper and betrayed the main rule of all politics: do not show at all that you are his enemy, do not show irritation at all. Stalin openly disobeyed him, scolded him in letters, and verbally, and complained to Lenin, and did not miss an opportunity. And as soon as he found out Trotsky’s opinion, decision on any issue, he immediately put forward why it should be quite the opposite. But you can't win like that. And Trotsky kicked him out like a city stick: he kicked him out of Tsaritsyn, kicked him out of Ukraine. And one day Stalin received a harsh lesson that not all means in the struggle are good, that there are forbidden methods: together with Zinoviev, they complained to the Politburo about the arbitrary executions of Trotsky. And then Lenin took several blank forms and signed along the bottom, “I will continue to approve!” - and immediately handed it over to Trotsky in front of them to fill out.

The science! Ashamed! What were you complaining about?! You cannot appeal to complacency even in the most intense struggle. Lenin was right, and as an exception, Trotsky was also right: if you don’t shoot without a trial, nothing at all can be done in history.

We are all human, and feelings push us ahead of reason. Every person has a smell, and you act by smell even before your head. Of course, Stalin was mistaken in opening up against Trotsky ahead of time (he never made such a mistake again). But the same feelings led him in the most correct way to Lenin. If you think with your head, you had to please Lenin, say “oh, how right! I’m for it too!” However, with an unerring heart, Stalin found a completely different way: to be rude to him as harshly as possible, to push him like an ass - they say, he is an uneducated, uncouth, wild person, accept it or not. It wasn’t that he was rude - he was rude to him (“I can still be at the front for two weeks, then let’s rest” - who could Lenin forgive for this?), but it was precisely this way - unbreakable, unyielding - that won Lenin’s respect. Lenin felt that this wonderful Georgian was a strong figure, such people were very needed, and then they would be needed more. Lenin listened to Trotsky a lot, but he also listened to Stalin. If he displaces Stalin, he will also displace Trotsky. He is to blame for Tsaritsyn, and he is to blame for Astrakhan. “You will learn to cooperate,” he persuaded them, but he also accepted that they did not get along. Trotsky came running to complain that there was prohibition throughout the republic, and Stalin was drinking the royal cellar in the Kremlin, that if they found out at the front... - Stalin laughed it off, Lenin laughed, Trotsky turned away his little beard, and left with nothing. They removed Stalin from Ukraine - this is how they gave the second People's Commissariat, the RKI.

It was March 1919. Stalin was in his forties. Who else would have had a shabby RKI inspection, but with Stalin it rose to the main People's Commissariat! (Lenin wanted it that way. He knew Stalin’s firmness, steadfastness, incorruptibility.) It was Stalin who was entrusted by Lenin to monitor justice in the Republic, the purity of party workers, down to the most important ones. By the nature of the work, if we understand it correctly, if we give our soul to it and do not spare our health, Stalin now had to secretly (but quite legally) collect incriminating materials on all responsible workers, send inspectors and collect reports, and then lead the purges. And for this it was necessary to create an apparatus, to select throughout the country the same selfless, the same steadfast, similar to themselves, ready to work secretly, without obvious reward.

Painstaking work, patient work, long work, but Stalin was ready for it.

It is rightly said that forty years is our maturity. Only here do you finally understand how to live, how to behave. Only here did Stalin feel his main strength: the power of an unspoken decision. Inside, you have already made a decision, but whose head it concerns does not need to know it ahead of time. (When his head rolls, then let him know.) The second strength: never believe other people’s words, and do not attach importance to your own. You need to say not what you will do (you yourself may not know, it will be clear what it is), but what calms your interlocutor now. The third force: if someone cheated on you, don’t forgive him, if you grabbed someone with your teeth, don’t let him go, don’t let him go under any circumstances, even if the sun goes back and the heavenly phenomena are different. And the fourth strength: not to direct your head on theory, this has never helped anyone (you’ll come up with some kind of theory later), but to constantly think about who you’re on the path with now and to what milestone.

So the situation with Trotsky gradually improved - first with the support of Zinoviev, then with Kamenev. (Emotional relationships were created with both of them.) Stalin realized that with Trotsky he was worrying in vain: a person like Trotsky should never be pushed into a hole, he himself will jump and fall. Stalin knew his stuff, he worked quietly: he slowly selected personnel, checked people, remembered everyone who would be reliable, waited for an opportunity to raise them, move them.

The time has come - and sure enough! Trotsky himself fell on trade union discussion- he made a fool of himself, he was rude, he angered Lenin - he doesn’t respect the party! - and Stalin is just ready with whom to replace Trotsky’s people: Krestinsky- Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky – Molotov, Serebryakova – Yaroslavsky. We joined the Central Committee and Voroshilov, and Ordzhonikidze, all their own. And the famous commander-in-chief staggered on his crane legs. And Lenin realized that Stalin alone stood for the unity of the party like a rock, but he didn’t want anything for himself, didn’t ask for anything.

A simple-minded, handsome Georgian, this is what touched all the presenters, that he did not climb onto the podium, did not strive for popularity, for publicity, like all of them, did not boast of his knowledge of Marx, did not quote loudly, but worked modestly, selected the apparatus - a solitary comrade, very firm , very honest, selfless, diligent, a little ill-mannered, rude, a little narrow-minded. And when Ilyich began to get sick, Stalin was elected general secretary, just as Misha Romanov had once been elected to the throne, because no one was afraid of him.

It was May 1922. And another would have calmed down, sat and rejoiced. But not Stalin. Another person would have read Capital and taken notes. But Stalin only stretched his nostrils and realized: the time is desperate, the gains of the revolution are in danger, not a minute can be lost: Lenin will not retain power and he himself will not transfer it into reliable hands. Lenin's health has deteriorated, and maybe this is for the better. If he stays with the management, you can’t vouch for anything, nothing is reliable: twitchy, hot-tempered, and now still sick, he became more and more unnerving and simply interfered with work. He interfered with everyone's work! He could scold a person for no reason, put him under siege, or remove him from an elected post.

The first idea was to send Lenin, for example, to the Caucasus, for treatment, the air there is good, the places are remote, there is no telephone with Moscow, telegrams take a long time, there his nerves will calm down without government work. And assign to him to monitor his health a trusted comrade, a former expropriator, the Kamo raider. And Lenin agreed, negotiations were already underway with Tiflis, but somehow it was delayed. And then Kamo was crushed by a car (he chatted a lot about exes).

Then, worried about the life of the leader, Stalin, through the People's Commissariat of Health and through professor-surgeons, raised the question: after all, a bullet that is not removed - it poisons the body, it is necessary to do another operation, to remove it. And he convinced the doctors. And everyone repeated what was necessary, and Lenin agreed - but again it dragged on. And he just left for Gorki.

“We need firmness towards Lenin!” – Stalin wrote to Kamenev. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev, his best friends at that time, completely agreed.

Firmness in treatment, firmness in the regime, firmness in removal from business - in the interests of his own precious life. And in removal from Trotsky. AND Krupskaya also curb, she is an ordinary party comrade. Stalin was appointed “responsible for the health of Comrade Lenin” and did not consider this a menial task for himself: to deal directly with the attending doctors and even nurses, to tell them which regime would be most useful for Lenin: the most useful thing for him would be to prohibit and forbid, even if he got worried. The same is true in political matters. He doesn’t like the bill regarding the Red Army - pass it, he doesn’t like the bill about the All-Russian Central Executive Committee - pass it, and not give in for anything, because he is sick, he cannot know what is best. If something insists on doing it quickly, on the contrary, do it more slowly and put it aside. And it may even be rude, very rude to answer him - this is how the Secretary General is out of directness, you can’t break your character.

However, despite all the efforts of Stalin, Lenin recovered poorly, his illness dragged on until the fall, and then the dispute escalated over the Central Executive Committee-All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and it did not take long for dear Ilyich to get to his feet. He only stood up in order to restore a cordial alliance with Trotsky in December 22 - against Stalin, of course. So there was no need to get up for this, it was better to lie down again. Now the doctor’s supervision is even stricter: don’t read, don’t write, don’t know about matters, eat semolina. Dear Ilyich came up with the idea to write secretly from the Secretary General political testament– again against Stalin. He dictated for five minutes a day, he was not allowed more (Stalin did not allow it). But the general secretary laughed in his mustache: the stenographer tapped-tap-tap with his heels, and brought him the obligatory copy. Here Krupskaya had to be punished as she deserved, - dear Ilyich fumed - and the third blow! All efforts to save his life were of no avail.

He died at a good time: Trotsky was just in the Caucasus, and Stalin announced the wrong day of the funeral there, because there was no need for him to come: it was much more decent, and very important, for the general secretary to pronounce the oath of allegiance.

But Lenin left a will. From him, the comrades could have created discord and misunderstanding, they even wanted to remove Stalin from the General Secretary. Then even closer Stalin became friends with Zinoviev, he proved to him that obviously he would now be the leader of the party, and let him XIII Congress makes a report from the Central Committee, as a future leader, and Stalin will be a modest general secretary, he doesn’t need anything. And Zinoviev showed off on the podium, made a report (that’s all the report was, where should he be elected and by whom, there is no such post - “party leader”), and for that report he persuaded the Central Committee not to even read the will at the congress, not to remove Stalin, he already corrected.

All of them in the Politburo were very friendly at that time, and all were against Trotsky. And they refuted his proposals well and removed his supporters from their posts. And another general secretary would have calmed down. But the tireless, vigilant Stalin knew that peace was still far away.

Was it good for Kamenev to remain in place of Lenin as the head of the Council of People's Commissars? (Even when Kamenev and he visited the sick Lenin, Stalin reported to Pravda that he walked without Kamenev, alone. Just in case. He foresaw that Kamenev would not last forever either.) Isn’t it better - Rykova? And Kamenev himself agreed, and Zinoviev too, that’s how they lived together!

But soon a big blow came to their friendship: it was discovered that Zinoviev-Kamenev were hypocrites, double-dealers, that they only strive for power and do not value Lenin’s ideas. I had to tighten them up. They became the “new opposition” (and the chatterbox Krupskaya got into it too), and Trotsky, beaten and beaten, calmed down for now. This was a very convenient situation. Here, by the way, Stalin developed a great cordial friendship with his dear Bukharchik, the first party theorist. Bukharchik spoke, Bukharchik provided the basis and justifications (they give - “an attack on the kulak!”, And Bukharin and I give - “a bond between the city and the countryside!”). Stalin himself had no claim to fame or leadership, he only monitored the voting and who was in what position. Many of the right comrades have already been in the right positions and voted correctly.

Zinoviev was removed from Comintern, Leningrad was taken away from them.

And it would seem that they would reconcile themselves, but no: they have now united with Trotsky, and that crook came to his senses for the last time and gave the slogan: “industrialization.”

And Bukharchik and I give - party unity! In the name of unity, everyone must submit! They exiled Trotsky, silenced Zinoviev and Kamenev.

This was also very helpful Lenin set : Now the majority of the party consisted of people who were not infected by the intelligentsia, not infected by the previous squabbles of the underground and emigration, people for whom the former height of the party leaders no longer meant anything, but only their current face. Healthy people, loyal people, rose from the ranks of the party and occupied important positions.

Stalin never doubted that he would find such people, and in this way they would save the gains of the revolution.

But what a fatal surprise: Bukharin, Tomsk and Rykov also turned out to be hypocrites, they were not for party unity! And Bukharin turned out to be the first confusion, not the theorist. And his cunning slogan of “a link between the city and the countryside” concealed a restorationist meaning, surrender to the fist and the breakdown of industrialization!.. So here they were, finally, the right slogans were found, only Stalin was able to formulate them: attack on the fist And accelerated industrialization! And – party unity, of course! And this vile company of “rightists” was also swept away from the leadership.

Bukharin once boasted that a certain sage concluded: “lower minds are more capable of governing.” You made a mistake, Nikolai Ivanovich, together with your sage: not inferior - healthy. Sound minds.

What kind of minds were you? processes showed. Stalin sat on the gallery in a closed room, looked at them through the mesh, chuckled: what kind of talkers they once were! what a power it once seemed! and what have we come to? got so wet.

It was knowledge of human nature, it was sobriety that always helped Stalin. He understood the people he saw with his eyes. But he also understood those whom he did not see with his eyes. When there were difficulties in 1931-32, there was nothing in the country to wear or eat - it seemed that if you just come and push from the outside, we will fall. And the party gave the command - to sound the alarm, there is a danger of intervention! But Stalin himself never believed the slightest bit: because he also imagined those Western chatterboxes in advance.

It is impossible to count how much strength, how much health, how much endurance it took to cleanse the party, the country from enemies and purify Leninism - this is an infallible teaching that Stalin never betrayed: he did exactly what Lenin had outlined, only a little softer and without fuss.

So much effort! - but still it was never calm, it was never like no one interfered. Then that crooked-lipped sucker Tukhachevsky jumped in, saying that because of Stalin he Didn't take Warsaw. Either with Frunze it didn’t work out very well, the censor blinked, then in the trashy story they presented Stalin on the mountain as a standing dead man, and they also clapped, idiots. Then Ukraine's bread rotted, Kuban fired sawn-off shotguns, even Ivanovo went on strike.

But Stalin never lost his temper, after the mistake with Trotsky - never again. He knew that the millstones of history were grinding slowly, but they were turning.

And without any formal fuss, all the ill-wishers, all the envious people will leave, die, and be ground into manure. (No matter how those writers offended Stalin, he did not take revenge on them, he did not take revenge for this, it would not have been instructive. He was waiting for another opportunity, the opportunity will always come.) And the truth is: whoever in the civil war commanded even a battalion, even a company in units, those who were not loyal to Stalin - everyone went somewhere, disappeared. And the delegates of the Twelfth, and the Thirteenth, and the Fourteenth, and the Fifteenth, and the Sixteenth, and the Seventeenth Congresses, as if simply following the lists, went to places where you couldn’t vote or speak. And they cleaned out the troublemaker Leningrad twice, a dangerous place. And even friends, like Sergo, had to be sacrificed. And even diligent assistants, like Berry, How Yezhov, I had to clean it up later. Finally, they reached Trotsky and cracked his skull.

The main enemy on earth is gone and, it seems, a respite has been deserved?

But Finland poisoned her. For that shameful trampling on the isthmus I was just ashamed in front of Hitler - he walked around France with a cane! Ah, an indelible stain on the genius of a commander! These Finns, a thoroughly bourgeois hostile nation, should be sent in trains to Kara-Kum, including small children, he would sit by the telephone, writing down reports: how many have already been shot and buried, how many are still left.

And troubles kept coming and going just in bulk. Hitler deceived, attacked, such a good alliance was destroyed due to bewilderment! And the lips trembled in front of the microphone, “brothers and sisters” burst out, now you can’t erase them from history. But these brothers and sisters ran like sheep, and no one wanted to stand to the death, although they were clearly ordered to stand to the death. Why didn't they stand? why didn’t they stand right away?!.. It’s a shame.

And then this departure to Kuibyshev, to empty bomb shelters... What positions I mastered, I never bent, the only time I succumbed to panic - and in vain. I walked from room to room and called for a week: have you already rented out Moscow? have you already passed it? – no, we didn’t pass!! It was impossible to believe that they would stop - stopped!

Well done, of course. Well done. But many had to be removed: it would not be a victory if rumors spread that the Commander-in-Chief was temporarily leaving. (Because of this, I had to photograph a small parade on November 7.) And Berlin radio rinsed dirty sheets about the murder of Lenin, Frunze, Dzerzhinsky, Kuibysheva, Gorky - cities higher! Old enemy, fat Churchill, a pig for Chokhokhbil, flew in to gloat and smoke a couple of cigars in the Kremlin. The Ukrainians changed it (there was such a dream in 1944: to evict all of Ukraine to Siberia, but there was no one to replace it, it was too much); changed Lithuanians, Estonians, Tatars, Cossacks, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Latvians - even the support of the revolution, Latvians! And even native Georgians, protected from mobilizations, seemed not to be waiting for Hitler! And only the Russians and the Jews remained faithful to their Father.

So even the national question laughed at him in those difficult years...

But, thank God, these misfortunes also passed. Stalin corrected many things by outplaying Churchill and Roosevelt-holy. Since the 1920s, Stalin has not had such success as with these two bunglers. When he answered their letters or went to his room in Yalta, he simply laughed at them.

State people, how smart they think they are, but they are dumber than babies. Everyone asks: what will we do after the war, and how? Yes, you send planes, send canned food, and then we’ll see how. You give them the floor, well, the first pass, they are already happy, they are already writing it down on a piece of paper. You pretend to be softened by love, but they are already twice as soft. I got from them for nothing, not for a sniff: Poland, Saxony, Thuringia, Vlasovites, Krasnovtsy, Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, Port Arthur, half of Korea, and entangled them on the Danube and the Balkans. The leaders of the “village owners” won elections and immediately went to prison. And they quickly turned Mikolajczyk down, Benes and Masaryk’s hearts gave out, Cardinal Mindszenty confessed to the atrocities, Dimitrov in the Kremlin heart clinic he renounced the absurd Balkan Federation.

And all the Soviets who returned from European life were put in camps. And - there for the second ten years all those who served only one sentence each.

Well, it seems everything is finally starting to get better!

And when even in the rustle of the taiga it was impossible to hear about any other version of socialism - a black dragon crawled out Tito and blocked all prospects.

Like a fairy-tale hero, Stalin was exhausted in cutting off more and more growing heads of the hydra!..

How could one go wrong with this Scorpio soul?! - to him! connoisseur of human souls! After all, in 1936 they already held me by the throat and let me go!.. Ay-ya-ya-ya-ay!

With a groan, Stalin lowered his feet from the ottoman and grabbed his already bald head. An irreparable annoyance stung him. I was rolling around mountains, but I stumbled on a stinking hillock.

Joseph tripped over Joseph...

Kerensky, who was living somewhere somewhere, did not interfere with Stalin at all. Let Nicholas II return from the grave or Kolchak- Stalin had no personal grudge against all of them: open enemies, they did not shy away from offering some kind of their own, new, better socialism.

The best socialism! Different from Stalin! Brat! Socialism without Stalin is ready-made fascism!

It’s not that Tito will succeed in anything – nothing can work out for him. Like an old farrier, who had ripped open a lot of these bellies, cut off countless of these limbs in chicken huts, along the roads, looks at the little white medical trainee - that’s how Stalin looked at Tito.

But Tito stirred up long-forgotten trinkets for fools: “workers’ control”, “land to the peasants”, all these soap bubbles of the first years of the revolution.

The collected works of Lenin have already been replaced three times, and the Founders’ works twice. Everyone who argued, who was mentioned in the old notes, fell asleep long ago - everyone who thought about building socialism differently. And now, when it is clear that there is no other way, and not only socialism, but even communism would have been built long ago if not for the arrogant nobles; not false reports; not soulless bureaucrats; not indifference to public affairs; not the weakness of organizational and explanatory work among the masses; not left to chance in party education; not slow pace of construction; no downtime, no absenteeism in production, no production of low-quality products, no poor planning, no indifference to the introduction of new technology, no inactivity of research institutes, no poor training of young specialists, no avoidance of young people from being sent to the wilderness, no sabotage of prisoners, no loss of grain in the field, no waste of accountants, no theft at bases, no cheating of supply managers and store managers, no greed by drivers, no complacency of local authorities! ne liberalism and bribes in the police! ne abuse of housing stock! nah impudent speculators! no greedy housewives! nah spoiled children! no tram talkers! no criticism in literature! no dislocations in cinematography! - when it is already clear to everyone that kamunism is on the right road and is not far from completion, - this cretin Tito sticks out with his Talmudist Kardel and declares that kamunism must be built differently!!!...

27.01.2016

What they don’t write about the “leader of all nations”! For some, Stalin is a tyrant who mercilessly exterminated his people, and there is no excuse for him. Others are sure: only thanks to Stalin our country was able to win the war and restore the destroyed economy in the shortest possible time. Maybe some little-known interesting facts from Stalin’s biography will help make this historical figure less like a monument and see “Iron Joseph” as he was in life.

Joseph Stalin deliberately changed the date of his birth in the documents - from December 18 to December 21 - even in his youth. He did this allegedly after the words of his fellow student Gurdjieff, famous for his gift of prediction, who warned the young Dzhugashvili: “With such a horoscope you will not be a leader!”
While in the upper echelons of power, Stalin submitted his resignation three times. But he was not accepted. Who knows, if the then leadership of the country had granted his request, what would have been the future of Soviet Russia?...
Throughout his life, Stalin read constantly. After his death, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism received 5.5 thousand books from the leader’s library - and many with his personal notes in the margins. It is interesting that the Generalissimo had great respect for historians, starting with Herodotus and Xenophon and ending with N.M. Karamzin and S.M. Solovyov, whose works stood on the shelves of his bookcase.
Stalin's sons were at the front during the Great Patriotic War.
The Generalissimo always carried a loaded pistol with him.
The leader's well-known personal modesty concerned only items of clothing. He really only had the bare necessities. But otherwise, Stalin did not particularly limit himself. For example, he had many beautifully appointed and furnished dachas throughout the country - in Abkhazia alone there were no less than five.
At Stalin's dachas, all the furnishings were thought out to the smallest detail. If there was a mirror in the room intended for negotiations and official dinners, then it was located, unnoticed by the uninitiated, in such a way that Stalin, during a ceremonial meal, could see the expressions on the faces of all those present at once - as soon as he took a quick glance in the mirror.
Before Stalin turned into the leader of the world proletariat, he repeatedly played the role of a raider: in 1906-1907. young Joseph prepared and carried out the robbery of several banks.
During his turbulent youth, Stalin managed to end up in exile 8 times.
Joseph Vissarionovich spoke not only Russian and Georgian languages. He knew ancient Greek, and in addition, partially understood several other languages.
Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva was 18 years younger than him. From the outside it seemed that they had a wonderful marriage: they respected each other and shared their thoughts. While apart, we constantly corresponded, talking on a variety of topics. Nadezhda gave birth to two children. But she was not a typical “clown mother”: she read with enthusiasm, participated in the political life of the country, and studied at a higher educational institution. Her suicide came as an unexpected blow to the leader. Today, around this terrible event, different versions of what happened are multiplying, like mushrooms after rain. One of them is this: Nadezhda read a book that opened her eyes to what was happening in the country, to what a terrible person her husband was. It was as if the world had turned upside down. The terrible truth lay an unbearable weight on her heart, and Nadezhda could not live with this burden...

No matter how many years have passed since the end of the “Stalin era,” people will probably never form a single opinion about the strange, unpredictable, intelligent and cunning man who held a huge state with a tight grip for almost three decades. Stalin destroyed people without any guilt, was omnipotent and inaccessible, suspicious and subject to all sorts of fears, like any tyrant. But, like every person, he was capable of sincere love for his wife.

Fate gave Stalin unlimited power over thousands of people. But even in his own family he was unable to create or maintain happiness. The worst thing in life is to be alone. Stalin found himself alone after the death of his wife. But he could not and did not want to change his life.