Stalin and His Hangmen

FIVE

IAGODA’S RISE

. . . if you magnified an ordinary flea several thousand times you’d get the most fearful animal on earth which nobody would be strong enough to control . . . But history’s monstrous grimaces produce such magnifications in the real world, too. Stalin is a flea which Bolshevik propaganda and the hypnosis of fear have magnified to unbelievable proportions.

Gorky’s diary, according to witness¹