February 23, 2007
Stalin’s chickens.
Here are a couple of quotes I came across on a martial arts forum, of all places, about Josef Stalin, another avid fan of brutalist architecture.
From Malcolm Muggeridge’s accounts of a conversation with Svetlna Stalin, from the book “Can Man Live without God”, by Ravi Zacharias:
“On one occasion Stalin called for five live chickens and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before his henchmen. Forcefully clutching a chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch, ” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some breadcrumbs in his hand. Incredibly the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a hand full of grain to the bird, and as it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on theme they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”
Every chicken has its day:
Stalin’s death fits Aristotle’s thought that ‘a tyrant is of all persons the man who can place no confidence in friends, as every one has it in his desire and these chiefly in their power to destroy him.’
Some of Stalin’s colleagues certainly had reason to hope for his death. He was preparing another purge and had also indicated that he was thinking of removing Beria from his post as head of the secret police. The night before his stroke, he had kept his colleagues up until four in the morning. He had said that some of the leadership thought they could get by on their past merits. Some of them may have been chilled by his further remark that ‘they are mistaken’.
All the next morning, Stalin did not appear. His staff started to worry at midday, but they knew better than to enter his room unless they were sent for. They first went in at eleven o’clock that night and found Stalin on the floor, conscious but unable to speak. The called Malenkov and Beria, but Malenkov would not come without Beria. At three in the morning, Beria arrived and said Stalin was only sleeping.
Under Beria’s instructions, no doctors were called. Beria and other leaders came back at nine a.m. The doctors followed.
Beria had delayed medical help for perhaps a whole day after the stroke had occurred and it seemed clear that Stalin could not live. Khrushchev described Beria at the bedside: “Beria started going around spewing hatred against him and mocking him. It was simply unbearable to listen to Beria.”
But Stalin regained partial consciousness and pointed to something on the wall. Stalin’s daughter noted how Beria changed: ‘Beria stared fixedly at those clouded eyes, anxious even now to convince my father that he was the most loyal and devoted of them all, as he had always tried with every ounce of his strength to appear to be.’ Khrushev says that Beria then ‘threw himself on his knees, seized Stalin’s hand, and started kissing it. When Stalin lost consciousness again and closed his eyes, Beria stood up and spat.
– Jonathan Glover; (1999); from ‘Humanity A Moral History of the Twentieth Century’
UPDATE: Stalin not a John Wayne fan.