| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Taking their cue from Conquest, popular and journalistic discussions of Stalin, and Stalinism, highlight murder and cruelty as his, and its, strongest and most characteristic feature. The journalist Richard Waters describes Stalin’s cruelty as so casual that is was “almost pointless”.5 In 2004, Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Stalin was “…solitary, pitiless and messianic[ally] egocentric”.6 As recently as March 2005, the Radio Times published an article in which the author asserted that during the 1930s Stalin had “murdered” 66 million of his own people.7 In his recent historical survey of the 1930s, The Dark Valley, historian Piers Brendan took this point further. According to Brendan, Stalin “made the tsars seem civilised” and had “a penchant for medical murder”, which he displayed by taking, almost personally it would seem, the lives of literally “countless millions”.8
If the common assumption is that the Soviet Union (particularly during the 1930s) was a realm of fear and murder then by the same token the common assumption of the US was of a land of freedom and safety. The historian Paul Kennedy, in a column for The Guardian in 2004, writes of a common assumption that understands “democratisation and Americanisation” as naturally advancing hand in hand.9 In other words, democracy and Americanism are considered more or less to be synonyms and if, as Philip Taylor asserts, democracies “respect individual human rights, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression and, when they have the courage of their convictions, they oppose those who would deny those rights”, then so too does the US.10 Indeed, whereas Brendan describes Stalin as having a “penchant for medical murder” he employs a quote from Winston Churchill to describe US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The President’s impulse “is one which makes towards the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land”. As it “glowed brighter”, Churchill said, it might well eclipse not only “the baleful unnatural lights which are diffused from Soviet Russia” but also “the lurid flames of German Nordic self-assertion”.11 In other words, as Stalin represented Soviet cruelty so Roosevelt represented American righteousness.