Ali’s Reviews > Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 > Status Update

More often Zinoviev went to the other extreme of embarrassing obsequiousness, even by the standards of the emerging hagiography: "As mighty as the ocean; as stern and inaccessible as Mont Blanc; as tender as the southern sun; as great as the world; as humane as a child." For all his oratorical prowess, on the written page Zinoviev tended to be diffuse, the opposite of Stalin.

Every dictatorship needs a ubiquitous 'enemy,'who threatens it from within. For that role,Trotsky was tailor-made,a gift to Stalin,once he figured that out.It was not Trotsky,let alone Zinoviev or Kamenev,but Stalin's principal patron,Lenin-or at least,dictation attributed to Lenin-who would prove to be the gravest threat to the absolute power inherent in the general secretary position,and to Stalin's psychic balance

At meetings, Barmine noted, Stalin sat off to the side, smoked a pipe that he stuffed with cigarette tobacco, and doodled, but he accumulated power because of his 'strength of will, patience, slyness, ability to perceive human frailties and play upon them with contempt, and the supreme gift of pursuing a chosen goal inflexibly and without scruple.'

And modern dictatorship - the rule of the few in the name of the many -requires not only the incorporation of the masses into a polity but a powerful symbolic repertoire and belief system, in addition to effective instruments of governance and well-motivated repression.