Imaginary interview with Joseph Stalin
by Charactorium · Joseph Stalin (1878 — 1953) · Politics · 6 min read
March 1949. Night falls on the Kuntsevo dacha, on the outskirts of Moscow, behind three rings of NKVD guards. The Generalissimo receives us late, as always, a cold pipe in his hand and a carafe of Georgian wine on the table. He speaks slowly, his Caucasian accent still present, his gaze fixed.
—How did a shoemaker's son from Gori find himself on the benches of an Orthodox seminary?
My mother, Keke, saw me as a priest. It was her dream, not mine — but when you're born in a hovel in Gori, Georgia, you don't refuse the only door that leads elsewhere. So I entered the seminary in Tiflis, learned Church Slavonic, the psalms, the discipline of silence. And it was there, precisely there, under the vaults that were supposed to make me a man of God, that I secretly read Marx by candlelight after lights out. I was expelled in 1899 for that. The priests thought they were forming a shepherd of souls; they formed a revolutionary. Discipline, you see, I didn't unlearn it — I simply turned it against them.
The priests thought they were forming a shepherd of souls; they formed a revolutionary.
—What remains of the pious young man in the man you have become?
One never quite leaves the seminary. Faith moves, that's all. In 1913, at Lenin's request, I wrote Marxism and the National Question — and without knowing it, I was seeking a new orthodoxy, a doctrine firm enough to hold peoples together. Later, The Foundations of Leninism became a kind of Scripture. Believers need a book, a dogma, a catechism; I gave them one. The difference is that my paradise is built here, on this earth, with steel and grain, and not in an afterlife that no priest has ever seen with his own eyes.
Faith moves, that's all.
—Why did you impose such brutal collectivization on the peasantry?
A backward nation is a nation beaten in advance. Look at the map: we were a hundred years behind the West, and the West does not forgive backwardness. My first Five-Year Plan, launched in 1928, was meant to close that gap in ten years. To do that, we needed grain, and the grain was sleeping in the hands of the kulaks, those peasants who speculated while the cities went hungry. So we regrouped the land into kolkhozes. It was hard, I don't deny it — you don't tear a people away from the wooden plow without cries. But when steel flows from the blast furnaces of the Urals, no one asks the plow what it cost.
A backward nation is a nation beaten in advance.
—And the famine that ravaged Ukraine in those years, how do you see it?
You speak of the years 1932-1933. I will answer you as a Bolshevik: history is not made with kid gloves. There were requisitions, there were resistances, there were deaths — many. The enemies of the Party would like to put it on trial; I see it as the price of a leap that no one else dared to attempt. The miner Stakhanov was glorified, his records, his socialist emulation, because heroes were needed to carry this transformation. The independent peasantry, it had to disappear as a class; it was written in the very logic of the revolution. I know what will be whispered. But he who wants an omelet does not weep over every broken egg on the table.
History is not made with kid gloves.
—They say you personally signed lists of condemned men. What did you do, exactly, in front of those papers?
I read. That's all, and that's the whole power. Between 1936 and 1938, during what was called the Great Terror, they brought me typed sheets — names, by the hundreds. I would go through them in the evening, here, by lamplight, and affix my mark. Sometimes I wrote a word in the margin. An enemy of the people is not a man you hate, it's a man you cut off, coldly, as you cut off a diseased branch. The NKVD did the rest. They will reproach me for those lists; they will forget that every state that builds itself first draws up a list of what threatens it. I simply refused to look away while it was being drawn up.
An enemy of the people is not a man you hate, it's a man you cut off.
—Were you never afraid that this machinery of terror would eventually turn against you?
Fear? It is the oil of the machine, not its sand. The Moscow trials decimated the high command, the old Party, Lenin's own companions — Zinoviev, Bukharin, all those who thought themselves irreplaceable. Precisely: no one is irreplaceable, and that is what those trials were meant to engrave in every mind. The NKVD files piled up, swollen with confessions and denunciations, and everyone knew that a sheet might bear his name. A man who sleeps easy is a man who plots. I slept little — not out of fear, but because the night is the only time you see clearly the men who smile at you during the day.
Fear is the oil of the machine, not its sand.
—Your nights are legendary. What does an ordinary evening look like at this dacha?
Ordinary? Nothing is ordinary when you govern a sixth of the earth's land. I rarely get up before noon, I work while others sleep. In the evening, here at Kuntsevo, I gather the Politburo around a long table: khinkali, shashlyk, wines I bring from the Caucasus, and we drink — a lot, because anyone who refuses to drink with me has something to hide. Then we go downstairs to watch films, sometimes until four in the morning. I love cinema as one loves a well-oiled weapon: I approve, I cut, I rewrite. Men think they govern through speeches; I also govern through what appears on the screen, and through that telephone that rings at my generals' homes at three in the morning.
I love cinema as one loves a well-oiled weapon.
—You mix jokes and humiliations into these dinners. Why this nocturnal theater?
Because a leader must see his men without masks, and wine tears off masks better than torture. Around my table, I joke, I mock, I force one to dance, another to drink to shame — and while they laugh out of fear, I read in their eyes who will falter tomorrow. These are not dinners, they are exams. Come morning, I reread the NKVD reports in my dressing gown, and I compare what the faces confessed the night before with what the informers write. The table and the file answer each other. They think I'm a cinephile, a bon vivant, Uncle Joe; they forget that the cult of personality itself is a mise-en-scène that I direct, image by image.
These are not dinners, they are exams.
—In June 1941, Germany invaded the USSR despite the pact. How did you experience this betrayal?
On June 22, 1941, the ground opened beneath our feet. I had signed a pact with Hitler in 1939 — not out of trust, never out of trust, but to buy time, and time ran out a few months short. After the initial shock, I went to the microphone on July 3 and said what I had never said: “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!” Those words were not Marxism, they were flesh. Every peasant had to feel that we were defending his land, his dead, even his church. Then came Stalingrad, and the frozen river sent the Wehrmacht back where it came from.
I had signed a pact with Hitler not out of trust, never out of trust, but to buy time.
—At Yalta in 1945, you are described as imperturbably calm facing Roosevelt and Churchill. What was your game?
At Yalta, in February 1945, I arrived on time, always on time, in my Generalissimo uniform, and I let the others talk. Roosevelt was ill, Churchill talkative; I had the Red Army a thousand kilometers from Berlin, and a map is worth all the speeches. They were negotiating principles; I was negotiating borders. Eastern Europe — I didn't ask for it, I noted it, under my boots. English diplomats said they were disconcerted by my silence; silence is the highest rhetoric when you hold the ground. From that table came the post-war world, divided into two halves. They thought they were winning the peace. They were mainly winning the right to see me settle in.
They were negotiating principles; I was negotiating borders.
—If you had to name what History should remember from your work, what would you say?
That I was given a country of wooden plows and I left a superpower armed with the atom. That is what weighs, when you take sentiment off the scale. In 1928 we plowed as in the time of the tsars; twenty years later our blast furnaces, our kolkhozes, our Five-Year Plans had raised the USSR to the rank of the two masters of the world. I once told writers that they were the engineers of human souls — because steel is not enough, you must also forge the men who will carry it. They will remember the blood, I know; they will write it in the margin, as I wrote my notes. But let them not forget the factory behind the blood. One did not go without the other.
I was given a country of wooden plows; I left a superpower armed with the atom.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Joseph Stalin's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.