When was stalin born

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5 interesting facts about joseph stalin

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Molotov Meets Hitler: Brinkmanship and Delusion

Molotov set off late on 10 November 1940 from the Belorussia Station with a pistol in his pocket and a delegation of sixty which included Beria’s two protégés, Dekanozov, Deputy Foreign Commissar, and Merkulov, sixteen secret policemen, three servants and a doctor. This was Molotov’s second trip to Europe. In 1922, he and Polina had visited Italy in the early days of Fascism. Now he was to observe Fascism at its apogee.

At 11:05 a.m., Molotov’s train pulled into Berlin’s Anhalter Station, which was festooned with flowers sinisterly illuminated with searchlights and Soviet flags hidden behind swastikas. Molotov dismounted in a dark coat with his grey Homburg hat and was greeted by Ribbentrop and Field Marshal Keitel. He spent longest shaking hands with Reichsführer-SS Himmler. The band deliberately played the Internationale at double time in case any ex-Communist passers-by joined in.

Molotov sped off in an open Mercedes with outriders to his luxurious hotel, the Schloss Bellevue

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For the past few decades, anthropology has viewed the exchange of alcohol as a lens to analyze power relations in society. Control over the means of production of the beverage is said to be a method of political influence and control. Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist from 1924 to 1953, understood this early on!

For the paranoid, blood-thirsty mustached dictator, the drink served both as entertainment and internal repression. In the Politburo (the main soviet decision-making body), Stalin’s comrades lived under the daily fear of being shot. However, there is another thing that his collaborators dreaded intensely than being arrested: being invited to a party at Stalin’s.

After the Second World War, as the health of the Iron Man began to decline, Stalin distanced himself from the center of power and grew ever more reclusive, spending more and more time in his small residence in the suburbs of Moscow, a true vacation fortress.

Some of his close collaborators were becoming the real faces of power: Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malen

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Excerpt from The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I can tell you I shivered, not from the gut-numbing cold but from a presentiment of terror. What in the world did he mean by Dead but not yet buried?

Zinaida asked the hour. Mandelstam never wore a wristwatch but always knew the time; he was never off by more than a minute or two. "It is twenty past eleven -- too late for you to return to your own flat. You must come home with us and spend the night."

I took Zinaida's elbow. "We simply will not accept no for an answer, darling girl."

"You owe it to me as a poet," Mandelstam said a bit frantically. "Nothing so depends on eroticism as poetry."

"That being the case," she said with a pout, "I shall have to say..."

I could see my husband was hanging on her reply; the prospect of an erotic encounter with this gorgeous creature had pushed from his mind everything that had happened to him that evening.

"I shall have to say yes."

The three of us fell into lockstep as we headed toward Herzen House and our flat. "I o