During the Second World War in the United States it would have been an act of treason for a journalist to write a slanderous profile about any of the leaders of the allied nations who were beset against the Axis powers. Not only would the writer face grave charges, but so would his editor and publisher. However, this does not mean that the editors of Coronet Magazine had to go so far over the top as to publish this article by the Soviet cheerleader Walter Duranty (1884 – 1957) of The New York Times.
From Amazon:
Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow
Bromance was in the air when Harry Hopkins (1890 - 1946) went to Moscow to meet Joseph Stalin (1876 - 1953) for their second meeting:
"He shook my hand briefly, firmly, courteously. He smiled warmly. There was no waste of word, gesture, nor mannerism. It was like talking to a perfectly coordinated machine, an intelligent machine. Joseph Stalin knew what he wanted, knew what Russia wanted and he assumed that you knew."
Mic-drop. When the attached article hit the newsstands in May of 1952 Joseph Stalin had less than a year to live and like most totalitarians living on borrowed time, the heavily guarded diminutive dictator had his public appearances drastically reduced in number:
"Today he lives in isolation unrivaled by any monarch since the Pharaohs. He must have forgotten what he himself once told the historian Emil Ludwig: 'Any man on a high pinnacle is lost the instant he loses touch with the masses.'"
The article has a fair amount of Stalin minutia you might find interesting. Here is an expose that revealed the hypocrisy of Stalin and the Soviet party members - who spoke of the inherit nobility of the laboring classes and the triumph of "the worker's paradise" while they lived like the czars of old:
"The children of the country's rulers already regard themselves as the hereditary aristocracy... The absence of a free press and consequently, of public criticism, allows them to retain this psychology even beyond their adolescence." Stalin's final days, as recalled by his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), were mired in paranoia; he had imprisoned his one physician (accusing him of being a British spy) and refused all medical attention - preferring to self-medicate with liberal doses of iodine. His hatred of the West had drastically intensified; he rambled on about the natural intelligence of peasants and was displeased that numerous members of his family wished to marry Jews.
(Click here to read another article about the 1953 death of Stalin.)
Read about the "Soviet Congress"
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