Podcast
Real Dictators
This book, by journalist and author Rosamund Richardson, focuses on Stalin's family and offers insights into Stalin's character, highlighting his practicality and intelligence, but also his lack of intellectualism compared to his contemporaries.
He was widely read, but he wasn't an intellectual. He didn't come from an academic background.
— Episode: Joseph Stalin Part 2: The Secretary Beco...
Episode: Joseph Stalin Part 2: The Secretary Becomes Dictat...
This book, by journalist and author Rosamund Richardson, focuses on Stalin's family and offers insights into Stalin's character, highlighting his practicality and intelligence, but also his lack of intellectualism compared to his contemporaries.
He was widely read, but he wasn't an intellectual. He didn't come from an academic background.
He had a church education, which was very wide, but he didn't have that particular grain of academic intellectualism that Lenin and Trotsky had. He didn't have that university education. He didn't have the Viennese coffee house background, and I think it made him feel inferior because his skills were so practical. He was a very pragmatic man as well as intelligent, but that is different from being intellectual.
He didn't want everybody particularly his family to know what was going on because millions of people were starving millions of people were sent into exile the family were not necessarily revolutionaries of that ilk they wanted to change society they wanted the ideals of socialism to come into play but not at the extent of the deaths of millions of people they would have regarded this annihilation of the peasant classes as a betrayal of their ideals