Harry Truman, The Curse of Baku & Potemkin

Simon Montefiore has the eerie ability to evoke flesh-and-blood from Yusef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, and I am currently addicted to his two books, Stalin in the Court of the Red Tsar and The Young Stalin.

SM makes this probable double-agent bank-robber Georgian into an auto-didact who would make Harry Truman blush, so addicted to history and music was this tyrant HST faced at Potsdam. Famously, when HST asked Stalin how it felt to be the conqueror of Berlin, the dictator responded "Tsar Alexander made it to Paris." When HST informed Stalin of the development of the yet-unexploded A-bomb, Stalin showed no interest, [and HST might have divined by that that Soviet intelligence had previously informed him, had Harry been a bit swifter]. At Potsdam or Yalta, Stalin shared with Churchill that the Great Famine in the Ukraine had been a great trial for him, because ten million [in his own estimation] died to make collectivization work. [Which, like all leftists, he deluded himself that it was actually a success.] The Terror which he inflicted on his own comrades evidently didn't affect him as much.

[Parenthetical note: Harry Truman was indirectly responsible for the Korean War when his inept Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, stupidly omitted Korea from a list of countries the US would protect, in a UN speech written by incredibly inept fool named Dean Rusk, the Asst. SecState for East Asia. Strange that this "oversight" has been neglected by "historians" who rush to condemn the US for everything from dropping the bomb on Hiroshima to Vietnam (which "historians" neglect to mention prevented a Communist takeover of Indonesia in 1974, the Year of Living Dangerously). Of course, Joe Stalin noticed and promptly gave Kim Il-Sung the go-ahead to invade S.Korea.]

Back to the main narrative: Simon Montefiore demonstrates among many fascinating details that Joe S. was responsible, along with Zhadanov, for rewriting the history curriculum for Soviet primary and secondary schools. Stalin famously admired Catherine the Great, for astutely picking lovers like Potemkin [whom SM has written a highly acclaimed biography] to help her rule the vast country.

My personal interest was in Stalin's views of Iranian [Persian] history, where he admired the poisoning of Nadim Shah of his enemies in 18th c. Tehran. Also, his view of Baku, where I personally, along with Sergo Ordzhonokidze [sp?] and Kirov, experienced serious problems with ingesting food or whatever that made them gravely ill. Haydar Aliyev, now president of Azerbaijan, told me that he had suffered severe food poisoning in the same restaurant that I had contracted a near-death dose of microbial murder. [The restaurant is owned by an Iranian, interestingly enough.

Baku is where Stalin, working in the oil fields when very young, fathered an illegitimate child. [Syncretistically, an Azeri-born mailman has just delivered a letter from our bank requiring my signature---happens to me more often than not---weird coincidences.] Other bad events happened to Soviet leaders such as the Armenian Mikoyan, who outlived them all and is an important source for this book.

The Azeris and Georgians were always more anti-Russian than other nationalities, although most chafed under Soviet rule. Bernard Lewis has read much of the "underground" literature written by anti-Bolsheviks in Turkic languages that few can understand with their dialectical variances.

I'm only a quarter through this fascinating tome and find it spellbinding. Although