It's a very sad story. Far from me being in any way a critic of Stalinism, I think that the Stalinist phenomenon in the twentieth century was something so terrifying, things went so monstrously wrong that we don't yet really have a theory, a real understanding of what went wrong. I don't buy all these standard explanations, you know, fanatics ready to sacrifice living people for the idea or whatever. All this is way too simple for me. Things went so terribly wrong, in a totally different way from fascism.
(And they hated everybody. They- There was a process, there wasn't any specific group, it was everybody, including each other.)
Absolutely. This is, for example, already one thing that people don't get it, it was a suicidal regime. I mean, are we aware of the monstrosity at the climactic point of the Stalinist terror? Mid-thirties. You know what was absolutely the most dangerous place to be? A member of Central Committee. Look at the names in the Central Commitee from '34 to '37. 80% boom-boom-boom. So, you know it's not- This is already the wrong perception, some elite group of fanatical communists killing ordinary people. No, killing each other..
(In fact the man who would do the killing .. they would boom-boom to him.)
Ah this is why, yeah, at the end- This is why Beria probably, if not organized the death of Stalin, prevented doctor's help, because Beria know what Stalin was doing, when Stalin nominated a new secret police boss, he immediately nominated someone who was formerly just a second in command, but whose task was to prepare a dossier to get rid, at a later stage, and, of him. So, Beria knew, he's next. He's next, in the line.
