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Stalin in Focus

“As a writer, I would like to examine what kind of soil the personality cult arose from, what social causes produced it. After all, one cannot explain everything in terms of Stalin's individual peculiarities. The philosophers ought to give an explanation.” Elizar Maltsev (quoted in Roy Medvedev's Political Diary) Parading under an innocuous title, this essay intends to disarm some of the extreme tensions that still surround the image of Stalin. The disarming, as Elizar Maltsev suggested, has to take a philosophical turn, reaching from the political and biographical data of the specialists into the larger issues of politics and morality that agitate an age of global interdependence and escalate the nuclear arms race. In times like the present, scholarship and a broad concern for the drift of events should overlap. Put differently, this essay tries to enlist the philosophical and historical faculties necessary to examine — and to do so humanely — the harsh context in which Stalinism operated.