JOSEF STALIN

Although far less cultured and intuitively intelligent than Hitler, there is a sense in which Stalin was cleverer, by which I mean shrewder and more cunning, better able to pursue a single objective, no matter how odious or seemingly trivial, and, above all, more realistic, less given to grandiose schemes or false delusions of grandeur. For all his personal faults, Stalin was no internationalist stooge, like Trotsky, but a down-to-earth Soviet 'nationalist' for whom 'socialism in one country' (though the Soviet Union was in fact a hotchpotch of disparate nations) was the means to consolidating and developing communism for possible subsequent external expansion and/or assistance.

If Trotsky was the communist idealist, fanatically bent on perpetuating revolution on a permanent basis, analogous in a way to Mao, then Stalin was very firmly communism's realist, and by taking the Soviet Union, battered and war-weary, off the idealistic pedestal of international revolution, one might almost say off the ideological 'gold standard', he not so much betrayed the revolution as ... rejected a chimera of wishful thinking. Too bad if some people have never been in a position, either ethnically or ideologically, to appreciate this apparent volte face at its true value!

More than anyone else, Stalin was responsible for saving the Soviet Union from the tragic fate that would surely have overtaken it had an unreasoning idealist like Trotsky been in the driving seat. And not only in peacetime, either! For it is inconceivable that the Soviet Union could have fought the 'Great Patriotic War' against Hitler's invading armies as well or as bravely as it did ... had not 'socialism in one country' been the battle cry, sounded under the banner of Slav nationalism, for several years past.

The defeat of Nazi Germany inexorably led to the extension of this Slav ideology to Eastern Europe, thereby vindicating Stalin's line of first things first and a little at a time. Whereas Trotsky was an idealistic aberration, Stalin was history in the making. He was a devil without peers.