The Pittsburgh Press (December 20, 1945)
Man of mystery!
Josef Stalin, at 66, stand supreme as most powerful man in world
Wide influence felt in both Europe and Asia – Dictator rose from poverty to pinnacle
By Eugene Lyons, written for The Press and NEA Service
This is the first of a series of dispatches by outstanding authorities on Russian affairs. A second article by Mr. Lyons, author of “Assignment in Utopia,” appears tomorrow.
NEW YORK – Generalissimo Josef Stalin, who reaches his sixty-sixth birthday tomorrow, is beyond compare the most powerful human being in the world of living men.
No other individual in our epoch, not even Adolf Hitler, has been so extravagantly glorified in his own lifetime.
His birthday finds Stalin wrapped in a black cloud of mystery streaked with purple rumors about his health and his political intentions.
But nothing can any longer destroy his right to place among leaders and conquerors hike Genghis Khan, Peter the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte in the annals of mankind.
Absolute dictator of the immense Soviet Union with its population of near 200 million, he also dominates half of Europe through Red armies of occupation and Moscow-made governments in an array of small countries.
Overshadows Asia
With the defeat of Japan, Russian might – and that means the might of Stalin – overshadows all of Asia.
His policies and purposes are the most decisive factors in shaping the post-war world generally.
It is not too much to say that the fate of the human race in the atomic age is in largest measure in his hands.
Moreover, as the omnipotent leader of world Communism, Stalin exercises a vast influence in virtually every nation on earth.
In non-Soviet lands, his word is law to millions of fanatic Communists whose first loyalty is to Russia rather than to their own countries.
Considering that he was born in a cobbler’s hovel as a member of one of the small, persecuted minority races in the empire of the Czars, his rise to supreme power and world leadership adds up to a “success story” with few parallels in all history.
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvilli, which is his real name, was born in the slummy hamlet of Gori, near Tiflis in the Russian Caucasus, on December 21, 1879.
Family poor
Desperately poor his uneven features pitted by a long bout with smallpox, his left arm slightly warped, he had an unhappy youth. It seared him with a bitterness and an abnormal suspiciousness which have left deep marks on the events of our time.
Until he was nearly 19, the future Stalin studied in a Greek Orthodox seminary in Tiflis in preparation for the priesthood.
While still in the seminary he was drawn into the underground movements of Georgian nationalists and Marxian socialists.
From the first he sided with the more extreme elements. Expelled from school before graduation, he turned into a professional revolutionist, working with the Bolshevik faction within the Social Democratic Party of Russia.
After he achieved the pinnacle of dictatorship. his biography was thoroughly “revised” to magnify his role before, during and after the revolution. Where necessary, records were falsified or destroyed to support the revamped story.
The truth, however, is that his role was relatively unimportant before the revolution and that he was unknown even to many of the underground leaders in his own Caucasus.
In the police archives of the period, he appears as a minor figure.
Stalin means steel
Like most other revolutionaries, he sported many pseudonyms, chiefly to confound the police. “Stalin,” which he seems to have used first about 1912, was one of these.
The widespread idea that the name was attached to him by Lenin, in recognition of his steel-like character, is pure fable. It was simply the fashion then to adopt “tough” nicknames with a proletarian flavor.
In his early thirties, Djugashvilli called himself Stalin, derived from the Russian word for steel, for the same reason that another became Molotov, from the word for hammer, and a third Kamenev, from the word for stone.
Shortly before World War I, Stalin did rise high enough in the Bolshevik ranks to be assigned to tasks in St. Petersburg and other large centers and to be given a place on the Central Committee of Lenin’s party.
But in 1913 he was exiled to the Far North and returned to active life only in 1917, after the fall of the Romanoff dynasty.
Though he was among the top leaders of the Bolshevik’s revolution which seized power from the Kerensky regime, Stalin’s part was so unobtrusive that few reports of the period even mentioned him.
While Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and the others held the limelight, however, the dark-visaged Georgian proceeded to build up a personal political machine. He operated so slowly, so deviously, that few around him were aware of his growing influence.
Lenin was among those few. In a document written in his last months of life, he warned against Stalin’s “rude” methods and urged his removal from the crucial post of secretary-general of the ruling part.
By that time Stalin was so deeply entrenched that he could suppress Lenin’s “last will,” as it came to be called.
Many years later, when he was secure, he permitted its publication.
Patience is perhaps the most significant element in Stalin’s makeup. He remained in the shadows for nearly seven years, until Lenin’s death in January 1924, carefully fortifying his domination of the party bureaucracy.
Then, for another four years, he played one leader against the other until most were eliminated.
By 1928, he was virtual dictator.
Trotsky, his main rival, was in exile in Turkey, while the others were in prison, in banishment or wholly subservient. In the great blood purge of 1936-38, Stalin finally wound up the slow-motion game by executing nearly all who remained of the founding fathers of his regime, along with tens of thousands of others.
Hitler pact
The pact with Hitler in August 1939 was typical of Stalin’s boldness and contempt for opinion at home or abroad.
He took the step, touching off a new World War, despite the fact that the Nazis had been pictured to Russia for years as the great menace.
When Hitler violated the pact invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin emerged as a great war leader who, after two years of continuous disasters, ultimately turned the tide and drove out the invaders.
It was under the pressure of war that Stalin first assumed government titles, becoming premier.
Until then he had ruled simply through his position as secretary-general of the Communist Party.
With the war ended, he is likely to relinquish some of his official posts and return to the behind-the-scenes role as party boss. His official position, however, is of no real importance.
His word remains law for his country and for the Communist movement of the whole world regardless what titles he deigns to assume.
NEXT: Stalin’s possible successors.