-Source-The Daily Beast-
A “dim but not commonplace” appearance with a face marked by “morose concentration” was how Leon Trotsky recalled his first encounter with Josef Stalin in Vienna in 1913, 27 years before Stalin ordered a Mexican agent to fatally plunge an ice-ax into Trotsky’s cranium.
A “grey blur” was how the prominent Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov described the future Soviet dictator in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik seizure of power, a world-historical event in which Stalin, a priesthood dropout turned bank robber, played no discernible role. Sukhanov was later jailed, then shot.
We know from the scholarship on 20th-century totalitarianism that evil can be both banal and radical and that these seemingly contradictory characteristics can be embodied in the same person. Tempting as it is to see the prime movers of history as great men and women, more often than not, it’s the middle managers and grey blurs who conquer and destroy nations.
Under normal circumstances, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin might today be a track-suited personal security guard for one of the many oligarchs who in fact live and breathe and luxuriate at his pleasure. Short, bald, with an almost reptilian gait, the former KGB case officer never seemed destined for anything other than bit player in the never-ending Russian tragedy.
For one thing, he’s not even from Moscow, but St. Petersburg, where he spent the majority of the post-Soviet democratic interregnum working for that city’s mayor and stealing public funds for his own benefit. Billed later as a master spy in the vein of the legendary Stierlitz, the hero of the classic film Seventeen Moments of Spring, Putin’s most important intelligence assignment was burning documents in a furnace in Dresden, a provincial outpost in the Cold War, as the empire he served crumbled. Read more