Stalin's Martyrs

Ludwig

My question is this. You have been repeatedly exposed to risks and dangers. You have been persecuted. You have participated in battles. Several of your closest friends have been killed. Yet you remain alive. How do you explain this? Do you believe in fate?

Stalin

No, I do not. Bolsheviks, Marxists, do not believe in ‘fate’. The whole concept of ‘fate’, of Schicksal, is a prejudice, nonsense, a vestige of mythology, like the mythology of the ancient Greeks, whose heavenly gods steered human fates.

Ludwig

So the fact that you were not killed is coincidence?

Stalin

There are both external and internal reasons, the totality of which has resulted in my not being killed. But regardless of this, someone else might have taken my place, for someone surely had to sit here. ‘Fate’ is something strange, something mystical. I do not believe in mysticism. There were of course reasons that danger passed me by. But there could have been a whole series of other coincidences that could have led to an altogether opposite result. These had nothing to do with socalled fate. ¹