GreyAtlas’s Reviews > The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years > Status Update

the
Soviet Union under Stalin was not a normal state but one run by a
criminal syndicate at the service of a bloody tyrant hungry for power
and ready to abuse it whenever he could do so without paying too
high a price.

There were more problems
than someone of more systematic working habits than Stalin
could effectively handle in one day—and his preferred nighttime schedule
was anything but normal nor was his reliance on superior memory
rather than on paperwork a guarantee of efficiency

During Stalin's lifetime,
Soviet policy was his policy, on the
whole conforming to Khrushchev's description of the despot as someone
behaving "like Almighty God with a host of angels and archangels.
He might listen to us, but the main thing was that he spoke and we
listened. He did not explain his reasoning, but passed down the word
to lesser mortals. They did what they were told when he wanted it
done.

A spoiled product of a rotten
system, Beriia was manifestly unfit to be a champion of its radical
transformation. Having spent a lifetime as a despot's administrator of
terror, he lacked the prerequisites of a politician, much less of a
statesman. He was one of history's more unsuitable persons ever given
an opportunity to shape it.

Although officials in Washington and London had been impatiently
awaiting Stalin's exit from the scene, they were utterly unprepared
when it came.35 Having set their minds at its long-term
consequences—the inevitable terminal crisis of the system no one else
could effectively run—they were at a loss about what to do in the
meantime

Less than an hour before Stalin expired at 9:50 P.M., the assembly
effectively deposed him by leaving him no other function than an ordinary
membership in the party presidium

Menon and Kitchlew were the last foreigners known to
have seen Stalin alive