There is a tract in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography, Young Stalin, in which an onlooker describes a bank robbery that Stalin commits (It is little known that Stalin was a criminal before a revolutionary).
In this particular scene, Stalin and his team of thugs have just thrown dynamite onto a horse carriage transporting treasures to a local bank.
The horse and travelling guards are blown to pieces. The onlooker describes how the mortally wounded horses and guards are so harrowingly disfigured, howling in pain and bleeding all over the snow, that Stalin’s own criminal brethren are stunned in shock and horror, unable to move.
Stalin himself, however, simply walks among the screaming figures and calmly collects the gold and other treasures, smears the guts and gore off the treasure bags, and walks away from the scene like he’s leaving a supermarket with eggs and butter.
Stalin, just as the author suggests, has “empathy”. But the author makes a mistake: he assumes that all empathy is created equal. And with this view of empathy he appears, as many on the Left do, to excuse a tyrant of his convenience.
Such people often assume, for example, that because Stalin sang beautifully, wrote poetry, and read widely, that he must secretly be a nice guy. In this view, the murder of 20 million people was some how an accident of “trying to do the right thing” with “the best of intentions”.
There are two types of empathy, in reality, that should never be confused: warm and cold.
A warm empath is someone who is able to understand people’s experiences and, with this understanding, has the desire to alleviate the observed suffering, or at the very least, not add to it further.
A cold empath, in contrast, has all the cognitive faculties of the warm empath, but simply does not care about the person they observe. Instead, they cynically use this knowledge to get what they want.
Stalin was famously able to decipher men in an instant, to know their weaknesses, dreams, corruptibility and whether they would be loyal to him. He had an exquisite cold empathy, which allowed him to manipulate people and, at other times, to delight in the suffering he was all too aware of causing.
Intelligent, cold-empaths, therefore, are the most dangerous type of psychopath (or narcissist) because they are adept at simulating what others want to see in them, and able, almost invariably, to read a crowd or individual and manipulate them.
The criminal justice system usually captures psychopaths who are low on the empathetic intelligence spectrum, which is why they end up in prison to begin with.
Psychopaths with high levels of cold empathy, on the other hand, go on to become very successful, as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Che Guevara and Bernie Madoff demonstrate.
I find it amazing, given the behaviour of someone like Stalin, that people can still see “the good in him”.
My impression after reading books on Stalin, and after studying psychopathy, is that Stalin was a bog-standard paranoid narcissistic psychopath, but with the gift of extraordinary cognitive (ie cold) empathy.
Pretty much all CEOs of large Corporations, Banks, Finance, Industrial, Government, are the ‘Cold empaths/psychopaths’ you mention- but very high functioning ones. The WEF who are well on their way of forming the world to a one world government with them as the Stalin figures, are all this kind. Claus Schwab, Christine Leguard, Fauchi, Bush, Soros, Boris, Biden…..
Thanks for that Hayden, but my understanding of empathy is that it can’t be ‘cold’; it is the sensing and sharing of another’s emotions. Seeing someone suffer or endure pain or fear is almost unbearable for someone with a high Empathy Quotient (as per Simon Baron Cohen’s EQ/SQ theory).
Bob Hare’s discovery that psychopaths do not experience fear is said to explain why they have no appreciation of, or sympathy for, their victims’ suffering; what you cannot experience, you cannot understand or ‘feel’.
But I’m completely on board with the idea that psychopaths study ‘normal’ people, to better exploit them, and that there are more ‘amongst us’ (as Hare says) than we would wish. I think the estimate is 1% of a population?
At the risk of being inflammatory, the failure to police our borders is concerning, in that predatory psychopaths (and criminals who are not psychopaths) are known to move from communities where they have been exposed to new hunting grounds where they are unknown.
I think the problem in part is that much is lost in semantics. In my estimation, your definition of empathy is ‘warm empathy’. If this is your starting point you are correct that psychopaths have no empathy.
My only push back is that I think it is possible to have all the faculties of empathy, cognitively speaking, without the final emotional connection required to make that empathy “warm”.
If the equation is just “warm empathy” versus “no empathy”, then it is difficult to explain autists, who, with the model you describe, have no empathy either, but are, nevertheless, usually not dangerous.
To me the distinction between high functioning psychopaths and autists is this: autists have low cognitive empathy, but high emotional connection to their acts. In this way, they do not wish harm on others and harm that is inflicted is simply the result of not emotionally comprehending their actions.
High functioning psychopaths, in contrast, have high cognitive empathy, but low emotional affect. In other words, they do understand exactly the human impact of what they do, on both a rational and emotional level, but don’t care. ie the cognitive mirror neurones are all there, without the final connection to the emotional centres of the brain responsible for “caring”, either because the connection is broken, or because the “caring” neurones don’t exist.
In recent years I have heard a few psychologists talk about empathy in the way that I have described above, so it seems some evidence now exists to support what was, I must admit, my own pet theory for a while based on my observations of an autist at work, and someone I retrospectively discovered was a murderous psychopath (thankfully now in jail).
Thanks Hayden. I suspected you had some personal involvement with the subject. Of course, Baron Cohen’s research focus is autism. I suspect a measurable difference between autism and psychopathy is primarily that many/most? on the autism spectrum are not ‘cold’ emotionally – they do experience (often intensely and to a crippling degree) fear and anxiety, for instance.
Having said that, I have often wondered if some serial killers were not on the autism spectrum, Dahmer, Nillsen
Sorry, accidental send. Lack of empathy and difficulty forming close relationships and/or indifference or disinterest in others seemed to be fundamental to both Dahmer and Nillsen, though they both craved a ‘silent’ companion?
I don’t think I know enough about the serial killers you mention to hold a view one way or another on whether they have autism or not.
My observation of the autists I’ve known do mirror your own though in terms of them being capable of great depth of feeling and of sensitivity, all while not being able to interpret the feelings of others.
It was this intruiging observation, in fact, that forced me to consider that empathy was more complex than I’d previously believed.
Why, after all, are so few autists malevolent? (though, you raise, quite rightly, that it is probably possible that one can be both autistic and psychopathic simultaneously.)
I did a brief presentation during my MSc Psych comparing traits for psychopathy and autism. There is some crossover, but I suspect few people on the spectrum can ‘hide in plain sight’ socially (compared to psychopaths, whose lack of anxiety makes them bold).
Not socialising easily, often disliking eye contact, would likely impair the development of social skills necessary to become an effective predator? Just speculation of course. I know a good number of people with ASDs and the only one who gave me the chills was a child who had spoken of plans to murder his sister. Many people with autism are gentle and kind, to the best of their ability.
If you care to read about Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nillsen, I think you might agree that both could potentially be on the spectrum. Brian Masters (if I remember rightly) wrote a book about Nillsen called ‘Killing for Company’ speculating that an inability to maintain relationships drove his crimes.
But I suspect the actual desire to hurt and harm as a primary motive (and the ability to enjoy the process) is limited to psychopaths because their flat affect/low arousal means they are thrill seekers who need lots of stimulus (however grim) to get any reward.
I hasten to add that criminology is not my field; I am coming at this from an interest in personality disorders.
I am not sure why anyone would think that reading would increase a person’s empathy in the sense of not only understanding someone’s emotions but positively responding to them. Indeed you could argue the contrary in the sense that reading calls forth and requires no positive response to the emotions of the characters whose suffering and travails are automatically distanced by their fictional or historic nature so that no response is possible other than to close the book. Moreover, the truly empathetic reader could just as well emphasise with the suffering of great tyrants in their efforts to bring about a finer world than with the individual counter-revolutionaries seeking to thwart their noble aims. Empathy does not determine choice of action if the judgement is between the suffering of one compared to the many.
Jane Watson
2 years ago
I find it unlikely that reading fiction, or any other literature, either implies someone has empathy or would increase empathy. Bookworms, and many writers, can be solitary and introverted individuals who use literature as an escape from the messiness and complexity of life and other people.
It seems more likely that people with high empathy would seek and value relationships and human interaction, and choose to spend more time in company than alone with a books.
I think it more probable that Stalin was a classic psychopath who used literature to study and understand ‘normal’ human nature and behaviour. Psychopaths are known to be glib and superficially ‘charming’ (or socially skilled) because they observe and learn how to appear to be what they are not.
Zero empathy, which is the classic trait of a psychopath, would seem to me to be a prerequisite to the deliberate pursuit of evil. Just my opinion, and I’m interested to hear others.
Reading gives one empathy. This is just de-facto – the more one is immeshed the reality of others, one better understands their motivations, hurts, wishes, trials and victories – they become human, we relate, which means we get empathy.
The whole article seems to be predicated on ’empathy’ being the summum bonum of learning. Admittedly this is what the pseudo-education of the modern humanities proclaim. Dare I suggest that not being uncultured, boring, stupid, ignorant or vulgar are far more important acquisitions?
I think ‘learning’, as in the accumulation of knowledge, can be overestimated as a driver of ‘good’ or ethical/moral (empathetic?) behaviour. Perhaps the belief that education always ‘improves’, and/or that it can ‘reform’ or enlighten is based on the premise that ‘nurture’ trumps ‘nature’ in human development.
The problem for basically decent people (the majority), highly educated or not, is that a minority are very much not like them and will exploit and victimise unsuspecting others without remorse. Trying to understand Stalin, Hitler, or Ted Bundy, if you are not a fellow psychopath, is probably futile. Hayden says the mirror neurones are not connecting to the emotional centres; I tend to think they have a module missing.
Ed Cameron
2 years ago
So much has been written about Stalin. For two brilliant recent works about the horror and the terror and how nobody was safe: Slezkine’s, The House of Government (a literary as well historical masterwork) and Schlogel’s Moscow 1937, cannot be bettered.
SULPICIA LEPIDINA
2 years ago
Had the equally well read Adolph not idiotically interfered with the execution of ‘Operation Barbarossa’*Stalin would have been consigned to the dustbin of history as he so richly deserved.
No punctuation left me confused. Thanks for the explanation.
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
Being well-read does not allow empathy with other humans. It allows empathy, instead, with the idea of what other humans should be and how they should behave – empathy with a theory.
At the risk of straying from the point, I have seen people who go from door to door explaining how everybody should behave in a Christian way and ‘love thy neighbour’ and then go home and treat their own close family very badly.
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
“Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy”
Reading without wide life experiences is like watching shadow puppet plays set in another land. Your mental pictures, and the characters, conjured up by the words have no real basis. You cannot actually understand it all really – you just see what you read as an extension of your own, limited, reality. That Stalin had a remarkably hard life in a hard place and time – and likely is a psychopath, gave him a reality of experience which made his empathy of a very different kind from ours, but I am sure his reading made it much more pronounced.
“Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”.”
Come, on – Russia has great literature, but it is of a type. Kafkaesque stuff – harshness, souls in torment, gratuitous cruelties, obstructionism, oppressed and oppressor, War, and dreary bureaucrats endlessly trapped in squalid jobs they do badly out of spite, broken hearts and worthless scoundrels, soldiers and serfs… Kind of like German actually(Both with dark Fairy Tails). I do not know Chinese literature, but always assumed it to be unreadable as I have not run into any of it.
I had a period in they teens where I devoured Russian literature (i’m told many teens do that). I re-read the books in my forties and found them beautifully written with wonderful psychological insights, but oh so utterly depressing.
I found them depressing in my teens, as well. This was a large part of the appeal — to contemplate the tragedy of human existence, a necessary (but not sufficient) start to the project of ‘how to build a meaningful life’.
However, George Borrow,*an inveterate English traveller thought this about the Russians in the mid 19th century:-
“The best-natured kindest people in the world, and though they do not know as much as the English, they have not the fiendish, spiteful dispositions and if you go amongst them and speak their language, however badly, they would go through fire and water to do you a kindness”.
Same here, and with my sister more so. I remember watching ‘The Seagull’ by Chekhov in London in a remarkable theater performance, and have always carried the feel – that Russian one of hopeless darkness which drives one to drink and forced masking of that existential despair… Story: group gathered in a Dasha – a man shoots a seagull for no reason, they talk, and in it one gets awareness of the condition of life. I lived many years remote, mostly very solitary, in the wildest Northern nature, and I have always felt this coldness, this cruelty and hopelessness of a living creature, as we are all set up for suffering, as that is how nature is designed to be. I always got the Russian zeitgeist from my years in the Far North – I get their mindset….
“TRIGORIN I shall never forget you. I shall always remember you as I saw you that bright day–do you recall it?–a week ago, when you wore your light dress, and we talked together, and the white seagull lay on the bench beside us.””
” “I am a sea-gull—no—no, I am an actress.”
” “If my life can ever be of any use to you, come and take it.””
― Anton Chekhov,
It is beautiful, but so dark…. I read a lot of them, but none were like seeing it
Matt Hindman
2 years ago
Interesting article, but it only focuses on one part of Stalin’s life and upbringing. He was also had a religious education, hated the Tsarist rulers, escaped from exile multiple times, and was adept at organizing and violence. He also led a gang called The Outfit that fought Tsarist and Cossacks while supplying revolutionaries with funds they obtained through criminal activities like armed robberies (not just against soft targets), ransom, and extortion. Later he would be involved in leading Red Army Troops against the White Army. All of these things would shape him into the man or monster he would become.
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt Hindman
Rob Keeley
1 year ago
Very slightly off topic perhaps, but it’s worth recalling Stalin’s love of classical music (along with Georgian drinking songs). Shostakovich, for one, would have preferred it if the Great Leader were not so interested in music, and let’s remember too the last thing he heard before his death, Mozart’s wonderful 23rd piano concerto, so memorably used to open Armando Ianucci’s The Death of Stalin.
There is a tract in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography, Young Stalin, in which an onlooker describes a bank robbery that Stalin commits (It is little known that Stalin was a criminal before a revolutionary).
In this particular scene, Stalin and his team of thugs have just thrown dynamite onto a horse carriage transporting treasures to a local bank.
The horse and travelling guards are blown to pieces. The onlooker describes how the mortally wounded horses and guards are so harrowingly disfigured, howling in pain and bleeding all over the snow, that Stalin’s own criminal brethren are stunned in shock and horror, unable to move.
Stalin himself, however, simply walks among the screaming figures and calmly collects the gold and other treasures, smears the guts and gore off the treasure bags, and walks away from the scene like he’s leaving a supermarket with eggs and butter.
Stalin, just as the author suggests, has “empathy”. But the author makes a mistake: he assumes that all empathy is created equal. And with this view of empathy he appears, as many on the Left do, to excuse a tyrant of his convenience.
Such people often assume, for example, that because Stalin sang beautifully, wrote poetry, and read widely, that he must secretly be a nice guy. In this view, the murder of 20 million people was some how an accident of “trying to do the right thing” with “the best of intentions”.
There are two types of empathy, in reality, that should never be confused: warm and cold.
A warm empath is someone who is able to understand people’s experiences and, with this understanding, has the desire to alleviate the observed suffering, or at the very least, not add to it further.
A cold empath, in contrast, has all the cognitive faculties of the warm empath, but simply does not care about the person they observe. Instead, they cynically use this knowledge to get what they want.
Stalin was famously able to decipher men in an instant, to know their weaknesses, dreams, corruptibility and whether they would be loyal to him. He had an exquisite cold empathy, which allowed him to manipulate people and, at other times, to delight in the suffering he was all too aware of causing.
Intelligent, cold-empaths, therefore, are the most dangerous type of psychopath (or narcissist) because they are adept at simulating what others want to see in them, and able, almost invariably, to read a crowd or individual and manipulate them.
The criminal justice system usually captures psychopaths who are low on the empathetic intelligence spectrum, which is why they end up in prison to begin with.
Psychopaths with high levels of cold empathy, on the other hand, go on to become very successful, as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Che Guevara and Bernie Madoff demonstrate.
I find it amazing, given the behaviour of someone like Stalin, that people can still see “the good in him”.
My impression after reading books on Stalin, and after studying psychopathy, is that Stalin was a bog-standard paranoid narcissistic psychopath, but with the gift of extraordinary cognitive (ie cold) empathy.
Pretty much all CEOs of large Corporations, Banks, Finance, Industrial, Government, are the ‘Cold empaths/psychopaths’ you mention- but very high functioning ones. The WEF who are well on their way of forming the world to a one world government with them as the Stalin figures, are all this kind. Claus Schwab, Christine Leguard, Fauchi, Bush, Soros, Boris, Biden…..
Thanks for that Hayden, but my understanding of empathy is that it can’t be ‘cold’; it is the sensing and sharing of another’s emotions. Seeing someone suffer or endure pain or fear is almost unbearable for someone with a high Empathy Quotient (as per Simon Baron Cohen’s EQ/SQ theory).
Bob Hare’s discovery that psychopaths do not experience fear is said to explain why they have no appreciation of, or sympathy for, their victims’ suffering; what you cannot experience, you cannot understand or ‘feel’.
But I’m completely on board with the idea that psychopaths study ‘normal’ people, to better exploit them, and that there are more ‘amongst us’ (as Hare says) than we would wish. I think the estimate is 1% of a population?
At the risk of being inflammatory, the failure to police our borders is concerning, in that predatory psychopaths (and criminals who are not psychopaths) are known to move from communities where they have been exposed to new hunting grounds where they are unknown.
I think the problem in part is that much is lost in semantics. In my estimation, your definition of empathy is ‘warm empathy’. If this is your starting point you are correct that psychopaths have no empathy.
My only push back is that I think it is possible to have all the faculties of empathy, cognitively speaking, without the final emotional connection required to make that empathy “warm”.
If the equation is just “warm empathy” versus “no empathy”, then it is difficult to explain autists, who, with the model you describe, have no empathy either, but are, nevertheless, usually not dangerous.
To me the distinction between high functioning psychopaths and autists is this: autists have low cognitive empathy, but high emotional connection to their acts. In this way, they do not wish harm on others and harm that is inflicted is simply the result of not emotionally comprehending their actions.
High functioning psychopaths, in contrast, have high cognitive empathy, but low emotional affect. In other words, they do understand exactly the human impact of what they do, on both a rational and emotional level, but don’t care. ie the cognitive mirror neurones are all there, without the final connection to the emotional centres of the brain responsible for “caring”, either because the connection is broken, or because the “caring” neurones don’t exist.
In recent years I have heard a few psychologists talk about empathy in the way that I have described above, so it seems some evidence now exists to support what was, I must admit, my own pet theory for a while based on my observations of an autist at work, and someone I retrospectively discovered was a murderous psychopath (thankfully now in jail).
Thanks Hayden. I suspected you had some personal involvement with the subject. Of course, Baron Cohen’s research focus is autism. I suspect a measurable difference between autism and psychopathy is primarily that many/most? on the autism spectrum are not ‘cold’ emotionally – they do experience (often intensely and to a crippling degree) fear and anxiety, for instance.
Having said that, I have often wondered if some serial killers were not on the autism spectrum, Dahmer, Nillsen
Sorry, accidental send. Lack of empathy and difficulty forming close relationships and/or indifference or disinterest in others seemed to be fundamental to both Dahmer and Nillsen, though they both craved a ‘silent’ companion?
Really interesting discussion, thanks both
I don’t think I know enough about the serial killers you mention to hold a view one way or another on whether they have autism or not.
My observation of the autists I’ve known do mirror your own though in terms of them being capable of great depth of feeling and of sensitivity, all while not being able to interpret the feelings of others.
It was this intruiging observation, in fact, that forced me to consider that empathy was more complex than I’d previously believed.
Why, after all, are so few autists malevolent? (though, you raise, quite rightly, that it is probably possible that one can be both autistic and psychopathic simultaneously.)
I did a brief presentation during my MSc Psych comparing traits for psychopathy and autism. There is some crossover, but I suspect few people on the spectrum can ‘hide in plain sight’ socially (compared to psychopaths, whose lack of anxiety makes them bold).
Not socialising easily, often disliking eye contact, would likely impair the development of social skills necessary to become an effective predator? Just speculation of course. I know a good number of people with ASDs and the only one who gave me the chills was a child who had spoken of plans to murder his sister. Many people with autism are gentle and kind, to the best of their ability.
If you care to read about Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nillsen, I think you might agree that both could potentially be on the spectrum. Brian Masters (if I remember rightly) wrote a book about Nillsen called ‘Killing for Company’ speculating that an inability to maintain relationships drove his crimes.
But I suspect the actual desire to hurt and harm as a primary motive (and the ability to enjoy the process) is limited to psychopaths because their flat affect/low arousal means they are thrill seekers who need lots of stimulus (however grim) to get any reward.
I hasten to add that criminology is not my field; I am coming at this from an interest in personality disorders.
I am not sure why anyone would think that reading would increase a person’s empathy in the sense of not only understanding someone’s emotions but positively responding to them. Indeed you could argue the contrary in the sense that reading calls forth and requires no positive response to the emotions of the characters whose suffering and travails are automatically distanced by their fictional or historic nature so that no response is possible other than to close the book.
Moreover, the truly empathetic reader could just as well emphasise with the suffering of great tyrants in their efforts to bring about a finer world than with the individual counter-revolutionaries seeking to thwart their noble aims. Empathy does not determine choice of action if the judgement is between the suffering of one compared to the many.
I find it unlikely that reading fiction, or any other literature, either implies someone has empathy or would increase empathy. Bookworms, and many writers, can be solitary and introverted individuals who use literature as an escape from the messiness and complexity of life and other people.
It seems more likely that people with high empathy would seek and value relationships and human interaction, and choose to spend more time in company than alone with a books.
I think it more probable that Stalin was a classic psychopath who used literature to study and understand ‘normal’ human nature and behaviour. Psychopaths are known to be glib and superficially ‘charming’ (or socially skilled) because they observe and learn how to appear to be what they are not.
Zero empathy, which is the classic trait of a psychopath, would seem to me to be a prerequisite to the deliberate pursuit of evil. Just my opinion, and I’m interested to hear others.
Reading gives one empathy. This is just de-facto – the more one is immeshed the reality of others, one better understands their motivations, hurts, wishes, trials and victories – they become human, we relate, which means we get empathy.
Excellent post.
Empathy is not the same thing as compassion. I wonder how the confusion started?
Oxbridge.
The whole article seems to be predicated on ’empathy’ being the summum bonum of learning. Admittedly this is what the pseudo-education of the modern humanities proclaim. Dare I suggest that not being uncultured, boring, stupid, ignorant or vulgar are far more important acquisitions?
I think ‘learning’, as in the accumulation of knowledge, can be overestimated as a driver of ‘good’ or ethical/moral (empathetic?) behaviour. Perhaps the belief that education always ‘improves’, and/or that it can ‘reform’ or enlighten is based on the premise that ‘nurture’ trumps ‘nature’ in human development.
The problem for basically decent people (the majority), highly educated or not, is that a minority are very much not like them and will exploit and victimise unsuspecting others without remorse. Trying to understand Stalin, Hitler, or Ted Bundy, if you are not a fellow psychopath, is probably futile. Hayden says the mirror neurones are not connecting to the emotional centres; I tend to think they have a module missing.
So much has been written about Stalin. For two brilliant recent works about the horror and the terror and how nobody was safe: Slezkine’s, The House of Government (a literary as well historical masterwork) and Schlogel’s Moscow 1937, cannot be bettered.
Had the equally well read Adolph not idiotically interfered with the execution of ‘Operation Barbarossa’*Stalin would have been consigned to the dustbin of history as he so richly deserved.
(* German invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941.)
And the Nazi’s could well still be in control of Europe
Is that a statement of fact or a question?
Given the Fatherland’s propensity for making really huge mistakes I think it unlikely.
It is a statement of possibility – hence “could”
No punctuation left me confused. Thanks for the explanation.
Being well-read does not allow empathy with other humans. It allows empathy, instead, with the idea of what other humans should be and how they should behave – empathy with a theory.
At the risk of straying from the point, I have seen people who go from door to door explaining how everybody should behave in a Christian way and ‘love thy neighbour’ and then go home and treat their own close family very badly.
“Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy”
Reading without wide life experiences is like watching shadow puppet plays set in another land. Your mental pictures, and the characters, conjured up by the words have no real basis. You cannot actually understand it all really – you just see what you read as an extension of your own, limited, reality. That Stalin had a remarkably hard life in a hard place and time – and likely is a psychopath, gave him a reality of experience which made his empathy of a very different kind from ours, but I am sure his reading made it much more pronounced.
“Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”.”
Come, on – Russia has great literature, but it is of a type. Kafkaesque stuff – harshness, souls in torment, gratuitous cruelties, obstructionism, oppressed and oppressor, War, and dreary bureaucrats endlessly trapped in squalid jobs they do badly out of spite, broken hearts and worthless scoundrels, soldiers and serfs… Kind of like German actually(Both with dark Fairy Tails). I do not know Chinese literature, but always assumed it to be unreadable as I have not run into any of it.
I had a period in they teens where I devoured Russian literature (i’m told many teens do that). I re-read the books in my forties and found them beautifully written with wonderful psychological insights, but oh so utterly depressing.
I found them depressing in my teens, as well. This was a large part of the appeal — to contemplate the tragedy of human existence, a necessary (but not sufficient) start to the project of ‘how to build a meaningful life’.
Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward, as you say, beautifully written but crikey!
However, George Borrow,*an inveterate English traveller thought this about the Russians in the mid 19th century:-
“The best-natured kindest people in the world, and though they do not know as much as the English, they have not the fiendish, spiteful dispositions and if you go amongst them and speak their language, however badly, they would go through fire and water to do you a kindness”.
(* 1803-81.)
Same here, and with my sister more so. I remember watching ‘The Seagull’ by Chekhov in London in a remarkable theater performance, and have always carried the feel – that Russian one of hopeless darkness which drives one to drink and forced masking of that existential despair… Story: group gathered in a Dasha – a man shoots a seagull for no reason, they talk, and in it one gets awareness of the condition of life. I lived many years remote, mostly very solitary, in the wildest Northern nature, and I have always felt this coldness, this cruelty and hopelessness of a living creature, as we are all set up for suffering, as that is how nature is designed to be. I always got the Russian zeitgeist from my years in the Far North – I get their mindset….
“TRIGORIN
I shall never forget you. I shall always remember you as I saw you that bright day–do you recall it?–a week ago, when you wore your light dress, and we talked together, and the white seagull lay on the bench beside us.””
” “I am a sea-gull—no—no, I am an actress.”
” “If my life can ever be of any use to you, come and take it.””
― Anton Chekhov,
It is beautiful, but so dark…. I read a lot of them, but none were like seeing it
Interesting article, but it only focuses on one part of Stalin’s life and upbringing. He was also had a religious education, hated the Tsarist rulers, escaped from exile multiple times, and was adept at organizing and violence. He also led a gang called The Outfit that fought Tsarist and Cossacks while supplying revolutionaries with funds they obtained through criminal activities like armed robberies (not just against soft targets), ransom, and extortion. Later he would be involved in leading Red Army Troops against the White Army. All of these things would shape him into the man or monster he would become.
Very slightly off topic perhaps, but it’s worth recalling Stalin’s love of classical music (along with Georgian drinking songs). Shostakovich, for one, would have preferred it if the Great Leader were not so interested in music, and let’s remember too the last thing he heard before his death, Mozart’s wonderful 23rd piano concerto, so memorably used to open Armando Ianucci’s The Death of Stalin.