by Ray Black
Although not one of the main players in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, he still rose through the ranks of the party despite Lenin’s mistrust of him. Stalin became General Secretary in 1922, a position that allowed him to build up a support base and gave him control over appointments to government positions, all of whom would be carefully chosen allies. Lenin, well aware of Stalin’s brutal character, was also wary of how much power the post of General Secretary afforded him. Lenin distanced himself from Stalin and, following semi-retirement after a stroke, recommended in his testimony that Stalin be removed from central soviet power. Through the forging of various alliances, notably with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, Stalin managed to make sure that the testimony was never made public and thus Lenin’s warnings were never heeded. Lenin died of a heart attack on 21 January 1924 and Stalin, using his power as General Secretary, consolidated his power base and gradually rid himself of his opponents on his way to becoming leader of the Soviet Republic.
In 1927, the first of Stalin’s ‘Five Year Plans’ was put into action. This started off with the massive industrialisation of the Soviet Union. His forced collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, while his programme of rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and economic growth but at great cost. Food wasn’t being supplied in the scale that was needed and peasants’ smallholdings were turned into state-controlled farms. This collectivisation was a disaster; five million people died of starvation as a direct result and, when the estimates weren’t met, Stalin had the people he blamed for the underachievement executed, put into the gulag system of slave labour camps or deported.
To truly consolidate his power, Stalin instigated the Great Terror, during which he purged the party of ‘enemies of the people’, resulting in the execution and exile of thousands. Colleagues were removed from office; some simply lost their jobs but others were moved to the labour camps or put on trial for treason. Stalin then moved on to members of the military; a large-scale purge of the Red Army followed, with high ranking officers shot or put on trial. His next target was immigrants. It is estimated that 350,000 people from countries including Poland, Germany and America were arrested, two thirds of whom were thought to have been executed.
At the beginning of the 1930s Stalin’s personal life suffered another, very public blow. His second wife was Nadezhda, whom he married in 1917 after bonding over their mutual love of Communism. Very little was heard of their private life; they had two children, Wasilly and Svetlana, during fifteen years of marriage but Nadezhda kept out of her husband’s limelight. While she was studying to become an engineer, students approached her and told her about the starvation and poverty facing their villages. She later spoke to her husband about this issue and the students were never seen again. Rows broke out as Stalin didn’t like his wife interfering in his business or having a different opinion to his. After a heated row between the two at a dinner to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Nadezhda dramatically left the room. A shot rang out after Stalin had left to follow her and, to this day, no-one knows whether Stalin shot her or she killed herself. The official announcement was that the great leader had lost his wife to appendicitis.
The 1930s was a decade that saw Stalin’s paranoia worsen to the point where anyone displaying anything other than absolute loyalty would be murdered. Colleagues who had once been close to him, including Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev who were instrumental in getting Stalin to the top, were killed. Sergei Kirov, his protégé who he treated as a son, was assassinated after he had opposed one of Stalin’s policies the same fate befell Leon Trotsky who was famously killed by a Soviet agent with an ice pick while in exile in Mexico. By the end of the decade, Russia was at war and Stalin had a new enemy; Adolf Hitler. After Germany reneged on a treaty by invading a Soviet area and then advanced on Moscow, Stalin forged a new alliance with the Allies who agreed to provide assistance and aid. By the end of the war, Hitler’s Germany had just under two million soldiers fighting against a Red army of six million in the east and had a force of just one million in battle against four million allied fighters in the west. In 1945, the war was won by the Allies and Stalin was hailed as a hero; Time magazine twice voted him ‘Man of the Year’ during the war and there were rumours that he was considered among nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Soviet losses, however, amounted to an estimated thirty-five million soldiers and twenty million civilians or one in every four people.
Eventually, Stalin once again became paranoid about an attack from the west and pre-empted such an attack by setting up a ‘buffer zone’ comprised of friendly subservient states in which he installed Communist governments. The Iron Curtain, a name made famous by Winston Churchill, was interpreted by the Western powers as Stalin trying to impose communism on the whole of Europe. This prompted the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, to be set up and thus commenced the period now known as the Cold War.
Josef Stalin died from a stroke on 5 March 1953. Most attributed his death to natural causes, but there are some who argue that he was poisoned with warfarin, a rat poison which inhibits the coagulation of the blood and is known to cause haemorrhagic strokes. Despite the countless millions of dead, the man who had himself celebrated as the father of the Soviet Union and the one who made Russia into a super power once said, ‘One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic’. This disdain for human life would mark Stalin out as one of the most evil men in the history of world politics.
Pol Pot
Described by one of his brothers as a gentle and kind child, Pol Pot would grow up to oversee one of the worst genocides of the twentitth century. His obsession with the Maoist ideology of a ‘year zero’ society made him responsible for the deaths of more than a million people.
Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar on 19 May 1925 in the Kompong Thom province of Cambodia into a family of affluent farmers. He was the second son of eight children and enjoyed a happy and privileged childhood. As a young boy, he was sent to Phnom Penh to experience the capital and further his education; with his family’s connection with the royal family, he was able to experience regal life first hand. Through his education he learned how majestic and important ancient Cambodia had been and how it had been steadily destroyed by foreign invaders; he became disillusioned with the royal family after seeing them as mere puppets of the French rulers and would one day vow to restore Cambodia to its former greatness. He spent a year being taught the fundamentals of Buddhism but also went to a French Catholic school where he was taught by nuns and these conflicting cultures would have a huge impact on the young, idealistic Saloth.
Despite not being a natural academic, Saloth won a scholarship in 1949 and went to study radio electronics in Paris. It was during this time that he became interested in politics and was lured by the Communist ideology. He would spend hours debating with his fellow nationals about how to free Cambodia from its colonialist shackles; the answer to which seemed to lie in Karl Marx’s theories.
SEEDS OF KHMER ROUGE
In 1951, he joined a secret branch of the French Communist party known as the Cercle Marxiste – the Marxist Circle. In joining this group, he would make acquaintances with Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Khieu Ponnary and Song Sen – the men who would ultimately join him to become the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. This group, which had originally been the Khmer Students’ Association, transformed into a nationalist, left-wing group which challenged the ideas of the Sihanouk government. In a leaflet entitled Monarchy or Democracy, he wrote, ‘[The monarchy] is a vile pustule living on the blood and sweat of the peasants. Only the National Assembly and democratic rights give the Cambodian people some breathing space… The democracy which will replace the monarchy is a matchless institution, pure as a diamond.’
Saloth ultimately lost his scholarship due to under-achievement and was required to return to Cambodia. Back at home in 1956, he got a job teaching history and French literature at a private school where
he was respected and well liked. In the same year, he married Khieu Ponnary, with whom he was at school. He spent most of his spare time, however, working for the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party, or the Khmer Rouge as it was later named, the Cambodian unit of the reorganized Indo-Chinese Communist party. It was about this time that Saloth changed his name to Pol Pot, which came from the French Politique Potentielle, or potential politics which was an extreme form of Communism that he believed fervently in. As a ruthlessly determined and dedicated revolutionary, Saloth rose through the ranks and was first elected to the number three position in the party’s central committee, a position where he could exert a considerable amount of power and build up a base of supporters.
Then, in 1962, he was chosen as leader and was given the title ‘Brother number one’. In the next year, Prince Sihanouk’s secret police stepped up their efforts to round up all of those who were thought to be Communists. Saloth was forced to flee to the Vietnamese jungle as his name was published among those suspected of leftist leanings. Living among the hill tribes there, he changed his ideas about the revolution and saw simple village life as Communism in its purest form and began to convert the tribes people into revolutionaries.
During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese troops were positioned near to where Pol Pot was in hiding. They took him under their wing and this eventually led to a life-changing trip to Beijing. Seeing how Mao’s Chinese government’s Cultural Revolution controlled the country, Pol Pot returned home with the idea of bringing Cambodia up to the ‘year zero’ ideology – a utopian concept of a peasant economy without any class or money struggles. From there he started to plan an extreme social experiment: to eliminate the modern world, rid Cambodia of its ‘evil’ cities and move their residents to the countryside where he would create an agrarian society.
In 1970, the National Assembly voted Sihanouk out as head of state. The North Vietnamese offered their resources to Pol Pot for his insurgency against the Cambodian government. Backed by Sihanouk, who pleaded with the Cambodian people to revolt, the people started to distrust the government and the U.S which was their supposed ally and moved towards Pol Pot’s party. Before long, the Khmer Rouge and their army had taken the capital and Pol Pot became the country’s ruler.
YEAR ZERO
The Khmer Rouge started its reign by evacuating the citizens of Phnom Penh to the countryside to begin the realisation of its ‘year zero’ utopia. These urban dwellers were forced to work on collective farms and slave labour projects and it is estimated that through his experiments to ‘cleanse’ the country, he was responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 1.7 and three million people. One of the main policies was social engineering, including agricultural reform, which resulted in a widespread famine. The insistence on self-sufficiency and a ban on the supply of medicine resulted in the deaths of thousands through treatable diseases such as malaria. Eventually the country fell into depression and repression. Vietnam eventually overthrew Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Pol Pot and various members of the Khmer Rouge fled and operated from the border region of Cambodia and Thailand where they clung to power. Pol Pot eventually retired as head of the Khumer Rouge at the end of the 1980s.
After a power struggle within the Khmer Rouge in July 1997, Pol Pot was arrested by his former colleagues and charged with treason. After a sentence of life under house arrest was passed by a ‘people’s tribunal’, he gave an interview where he boldly stated: ‘My conscience is clear’. As the combined effects of the slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions initiated by him resulted in the deaths of over twenty per cent of the population, this statement was not well received.
THE FINAL ESCAPE
Pol Pot died in 1998. It has not been proven as to whether he died of natural causes, committed suicide or was murdered. Despite his death heralding a new era for Cambodia, there are some survivors of his brutal regime who would have preferred to see him brought to trial for the atrocities that he committed. His legacy remains to this day with Cambodia being one of the world’s poorest countries; burdened with decades of conflict, unexploded mines continue to kill and maim its inhabitants, around seventy per cent of the population are still working in subsistence farming and only now are the men responsible for the genocide being brought to trial.
Saddam Hussein
From the start of his despotic reign as president of Iraq in 1979 to his execution in 2006, the public life of Saddam Hussein will be indelibly imprinted on people’s minds due to the invasions, wars and the countless deaths that he was responsible for in his two decades of power.
A date of birth may not seem that significant to some, but even this was subject to Saddam’s notorious spin-doctoring. There is some debate as to when he was actually born; his official birthday, which is also a national holiday in Iraq, is 28 April, and the official year, 1937. However, as Saddam was born in an exceptionally poor area of Iraq at a time where the process of registering of births, marriages and deaths was rather primitive, the exact date is all but unknown. It was customary for all children from provincial parts of the country to be registered as being born on 1 July; the real debate, however, is the year in which he was born. It is thought that Saddam could be a few years younger than he proclaimed and took his official birth date from a friend of his, who came from a rich family and therefore had a birth certificate; it is also speculated that he chose 1937 as it would make him look older and wiser in the eyes of his people during his rise to the top, and because it was the same year as his wife’s birth – marrying an older woman was frowned upon in Arab society.
THE ONE WHO CONFRONTS
Saddam, whose name means ‘the one who con-fronts’, grew up in the impoverished village of Al-Ouja, lying on the bend of the Tigris River on the outskirts of the town of Tikrit, Iraq. It had no electricity or running water and had become a haven for bandits who would steal from the boats bringing supplies to the major towns. Saddam was born in a mud hut which was owned by his uncle, a Nazi sympathizer, and it was this man, Khairallah Talfah, who would provide a huge source of inspiration to the young Saddam. He never knew his father as he is thought to have left his mother before Saddam was born. Unable to support him, his mother sent him to live with his uncle until the age of three. Saddam then returned home after his mother had remarried and sent for him. He suffered beatings from his stepfather, who was known as Hassan the Liar and, rather than being sent to school, Saddam was put to work around the house and forced to steal livestock and food from local farms. This brutal upbringing would convince him that the world was an unrelentingly harsh place and he eventually ran away to live with his uncle. Here he enjoyed a much better quality of life and was enrolled in a school in Baghdad. As he was illiterate and ill-educated, Saddam suffered bullying and to protect himself, bought an iron bar with him which he would heat up and stab animals with to show his power over life. As he was a bright child and a fast learner, he managed to graduate and went to Baghdad to further his education. Iraq was a hive of political activity in the 1950s as the British had withdrawn from the area after the end of the World War Two and there was a feeling that Iraq could finally free itself from the shackles of colonialist control enforced after World War One. This nationalistic feeling, coupled with Khairallah’s vehement anti-British, pro-Nazi views, prompted Saddam to join the Baath Party, an Arab nationalist organisation.
RETURN OF A QUIET, MODEST MAN
After various coups and the end of the British-backed monarchy in Iraq, the Baath Party took its place once more as the country’s leading party. After a failed attempt on the previous president’s life, which had forced him to flee the country, and a brief spell in prison due to his participation in an attempted coup d’etat, Saddam returned to the free world, married to his cousin, Sajida, and ready to work his way to the top. Prior to his incarceration, Saddam had been given the title of Deputy Secretary General and now back in active government, he bided his time and presented himself as a quiet and modest
man who would lay down his life for the present leader, the ailing President Ahmed Hassan Bakr. Gradually, he made sure that the army was subordinate to the government, thus ensuring the protection of the party and making sure that any attempt to overthrow the Baath party would end in failure.
As the power behind the president, Saddam brought about much change in Iraq. Through the seizure of control over oil, he boosted the economy and set about improving Iraq’s infrastructure with the development of industry and the building of new roads and, in a nod to his birthplace, nearly all areas in Iraq now had electricity. He also implemented plans to make life better for the people; these included a campaign to make education free, including an anti-illiteracy campaign; hospitalisation was made free, money was given to the families of soldiers, farming was subsidized and the unskilled were trained. These gifts to the nation made Saddam hugely popular and he was credited with the rapid growth of Iraq’s development.
In 1979, after forcing the resignation of President Bakr, Saddam took his place as leader. Fearing that few could be trusted, the most important positions in Saddam’s government went to members of his own family and very close friends and to further strengthen his position, one of his first acts was to put to death many of his political rivals and after this, there was no stopping him.
CULT OF SADDAM
Many have attributed Saddam’s success to loyalty through terror; even as deputy, he had any enemies of the regime executed and his revolutionary tribunals gave the death penalty to hundreds of victims on phoney charges. In the early days of his rule, much like Josef Stalin, a man he looked up to, Saddam set about creating an image for his people to worship; his portraits adorned every house and street, showing the President as a father figure, military leader as well as a humble, traditional Iraqi. He also had huge statues of himself erected and great monuments, bordering on the religious, dedicated to him.
