Stalin the Terrible

The century just gone was, in Robert Conquest’s telling phrase, a ‘ravaged’ one. It bore witness, as did millions of people, to some of the most extreme political conditions, most devastating wars and most evil figures in the history of the world – and I believe that word is justified. But more evil, more extreme and more ravaged by war than any other state and nation was the Soviet Union, a creation of the early 20^th century which did not survive its close. If anything stands to symbolise those hundred years – more so than the Nazi regime which lasted for a mere twelve – that particular entity, Ronald Reagan’s ‘evil empire’, should do it.

Continuity and Change after the Bolshevik Revolution

The eventual shape of the Soviet Union, it could be argued, was vastly different to that which had been envisaged by its founders, and vastly divergent to the predictions of its intellectual forefathers. After the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in the major cities of St Petersburg and Moscow. What they did not possess, however, was the support of the whole country; quite obviously, this was not going to be a harmonious or peaceful transfer of power. This could simply never have happened – and certainly not in the situation which presented itself after revolution, with all of Russia’s political factions arranged in opposition and still in the process, it must be remembered, of fighting a crippling war against Germany.