![]() ![]() His story is, unavoidably, a tale of continual slaughter. On other occasions, he is specific: '10 per cent of the Georgian party were killed.' More precise still: 'On 29 July signed another death list that included more of Yezor's protégés.'įrom time to time, the account of horror is only an aside: 'Before he turned wantonly to kill another of his friend's wives.' But that is how Stalin lived. In 1931, there was 'a war of extermination in the countryside'. Reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin, it seems at first that the author is preoccupied with accounts of murder. The blood ran so thick and deep that it presents historians with a problem. And, for good measure, they liquidated their enemies' wives and children, too. ![]() Yet Stalin and those who served him continued the policy of mass murder for almost 30 years, liquidating everyone who was thought to stand in their way. The deceit and hypocrisy prove that they could feel shame, if not guilt. But the leaders of the interwar Soviet Union, for whom killing was an instrument of policy, 'never discussed the Terror before children who lived in a world of lies'. ![]()
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