ABSTRACT
V. I. Lenin, albeit tardily, realized that Joseph Stalin’s personality very much mattered. But neither he nor others who later arrived at the same realization succeeded in supporting this insight with anything like an adequate analysis of Joseph Stalin’s character. Joseph Stalin’s accomplishments, it must be granted, were sufficient to encourage him in his hubris. A discrepancy between Stalin’s acquired sense of Russian self-identity and the fact of his being Georgian. Stalin returned to the question of his rudeness in his speech of October 23, 1927, quoting the postscript to Lenin’s testament and acknowledging the justice of the charge that Lenin had brought against him. Stalin found in his writings a wealth of material that he wrought into his own image of the enemy. Stalin’s passion for vindictive exposure of internal enemies who, he thought, had lived lives of pretense behind masks of Bolshevism would become horrifyingly evident in the coming decade of the thirties.
