Andrzej Wajda???s tragic WWII drama ???Katyn??? offers a reminder of one of Stalin's great crimes the systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of Poland's officer class captured by the Soviet's at the outbreak of WWII. (Don't forget Stalin signed a deal with Hitler that also included the division of Poland that sparked the war in September 1939. Hopefully we'll be able to see this important film soon in America.
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Portrait Of The Tyrant As A Young Man
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Stalin reveled in conspiracy, assuming 160 aliases during the time that he was organizing heists, rotating in and out of tsarist prisons or internal exile (and escaping several times), or flitting across Europe to cities like Cracow, Vienna and London for meetings with Lenin and other Bolsheviks. He also found time to marry, sire a legitimate son and probably two illegitimate children, and bed numerous women both when he was free and in internal exile. Among them was 13-year-old Lidia Pereprygina, whom he met when he was dispatched to her hamlet on the Arctic Circle when he was 34. She would give birth to one child who died and another, a son, who survived. Stalin learned about his existence only later—but never acknowledged him.
If Stalin was shaped by the violence and conspiracies of the Caucasus during the twilight of the tsarist era, his stints in Siberia also determined his character. "He brought the self-reliance, vigilance, frigidity and solitude of the Siberian hunter with him to the Kremlin," Montefiore concludes. Or, as Stalin sidekick Vyacheslav Molotov would put it, "A little piece of Siberia remained in Stalin for the rest of his life." From all the components of his early turbulent life, Stalin—"the man of steel"—would emerge. Montefiore has performed the prodigious feat of tracing that terrifying journey step by bloody step.
© 2007
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