ABSTRACT
For a long while past, Stalin had been considering a plan. He expounded his ideas in a long conversation with Menjinsky. 'The more we persecute our opponents', Menjinsky declared, 'the more popular they will be throughout the country. Remember the results of the Tsarist repression!'. According to Stalin, the Tsarist regime did not depend on any social class, apart from a few representatives of the nobility and the great landowners. On 21st December, 1933, which was his fifty-fourth birthday, Stalin delivered an address before an intimate circle of friends and members of the Politburo, at which some of his private secretaries were present. Innumerable addresses from kolkhozians and workers—declarations from the remotest corners of the USSR—written in more or less flowery language, never ceased henceforth to give support to the veritable personal cult of Stalin, and an official legend endeavoured to date the first manifestations of the 'genius of the Father of the Peoples' from the period before the revolution.
