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reading about how in 1936-37 Stalin decided on a whim to kill off or imprison almost every German and Austrian communist who had fled Nazi Germany to the USSR, or their children 
the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, though, because the secret police officers who did this purge were then almost universally executed in the next one
the purges really were the death knell for a whole wave of proletarian internationalism. all of that potential destroyed out of hand
anyway I think Stalin was more right than he knew when it really sank in that the Germans were invading in 1941 and he collapsed onto a couch and said in tears ‘I have destroyed the revolution’
part of the problem was that on his climb up he killed anyone else who could have been capable of winning the war. it had to be him, because it couldn’t have been any of the loyal mediocrities he left around him
I dunno, I think it is a tragedy in the classical sense. Trotsky called Martov ‘the Hamlet of the revolution’ but I think Stalin is the Macbeth
He also almost certainly murdered Lenin in my view
I keep going back and forth on Stalin and how I feel about him, and I think the synthesis is actually from a science fiction novel, Yellow Blue Tibia, where as a ghostly alien vision he laughs in the protagonist’s face for ever thinking he was human
The only other historical comparison I can draw that isn’t to Hitler is the more successful Roman emperors. Augustus was as a matter of faith not human and I wonder what that kind of remoteness does, or what kind of person you have to be to affect it
Think a lot about Bulgarian at his trial, appealing for mercy to a seemingly omnipresent but invisible Stalin, knowing he could receive none but still having that belief and that hope
One of the things that sticks with me most about narratives from Nazi Germany was that any disturbing evidence of corruption or hypocrisy or murder was immediately met with ‘if only the führer knew,’ or ‘the führer can’t be everywhere’, as if the real world couldn’t tarnish him
also I can’t believe it autocorrected Bukharin to ‘Bulgarian’
Anyway I don’t have any real conclusions to draw from any of this other than to marvel and horror at the cult of personality
