Death In The Kremlin: The Evil That Men Do

Joseph Stalin was liquidated last week by the common fate of all men. The event was so big that only the simplest words could form his epitaph: he was the most powerful man of his time—the most feared and hated. He might have boasted in the words of the Roman song honoring Emperor Aurelian:

A thousand, thousand, thousand men I alone, a single man, have killed.

More chilling than the size of the prison empire he built, more terrible than the millions he sent to death or servitude, was the inexorable way he spread—with armies, intrigues and ideologies—a secular religion of evil that threatened every country and every people, every truth and every faith. His regime created slaves; more importantly, at home & abroad his ideology created willing servants.

The day after Stalin’s death was proclaimed, the world learned the name of his successor: Georgy Malenkov, gross and flaccid in appearance but in fact a chip off the same granite block. For the moment, there was no sign of quarreling among the pallbearers. While the new regime dug in, the rest of the world might get a breathing spell, But the death of Stalin itself did not change any fact of geography, economics or ambition; it did not destroy a single Soviet regiment nor ground a single MIG, nor stop a single spy.

Perhaps the most elusive element in Moscow’s great transfer of power is the incalculable human factor, which Marxism tries hard to deny. There is no doubt that the Communist cause had lost its ablest leader and was, thereby, that much weakened. But more than any single political force in history, Communism seems to have found a way to make sure that the evil that men do will live after them.