The Wolves are Closing In   On February 17, 1953, 16 days before his assassination, Stalin met with the Indian ambassador Shri Menon. As it was his custom during conversations of late, Stalin took to doodling with a pencil and pad. On this particular day, he sketched wolves in various postures.   - You like wolves? Ambassador Menon asked.  Stalin replied:   - “Make yourself into a sheep and you’ll find  that wolves are closing in.”   - “You, Mr. Premier, a sheep?” Menon expressed  his doubt. Stalin smiled and responded:   - “Do not be deceived, Mr. Ambassador. Look  around when you leave. See what I mean.  When a wolf shows his teeth, he isn’t laughing.”

Joseph Stalin (r. 1922-1953) Enhanced reality portrait.

The Steel Age

Shortly before his death in 1924, Lenin was succeeded by Joseph Stalin. During Premier Stalin's administration, the modern industrial base of the Soviet Union was developed. Toward the end of the Stalin's rule, the Soviet Empire reached its largest extent. Stalin's favorite saying was

'dogs bark, the caravan moves on.'

His favorite book was Boleslaw Prus’ (1895) Pharaoh, a novel on an archetype of the mechanisms of state power.

With the passage of time, the magnitude of atrocities ascribed to Joseph Stalin is not diminishing. The anti-Stalin propaganda intensified after the fall of the Soviet Union and the numbers of millions of his alleged victims are reaching absurd magnitudes. These atrocity attributions are characteristics of the religious hate mythology, not accessible to rational arguments.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

Voices of the oppressed  W.E.B. Du Bois conducted numerous studies of Black society in America and believed that social science could provide solutions to race problems. W.E.B. Du Bois (in Sundquist, 1996, p. 287) describes Joseph Stalin as follows.

"Stalin was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy or balance; nor did he let attack neither drive him from his convictions nor induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly. His judgment of men was profound. As one of the despised minorities of man, he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality.

Paul Robeson (1898-1976) U.S. Postage stamp, 2004.

Paul Robeson, best known for singing the Ol' Man River in Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat, left the bar after a a stenographer refused to take down a memo, saying,

I never take dictation from a nigger.

Paul Robeson (1978, pp. 347-349) wrote about Stalin:

In the Soviet Union, Yakuts, Nenetses, Kirgiz, Tadzhiks were helped to advance. In the development of minorities Stalin had played a decisive role. No empty promises, such as colored folk continuously hear in the United States, but deeds. And arrayed against them, the combined powers of the so-called Free West, headed by the greedy, profit-hungry, war-minded industrialists and financial barons of our America. The illusion of an "American Century" blinds them to see how under the Stalin millions of enslaved people have found a new life.

G. Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Voices of those who knew him
In 1931, G. Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union and spent an evening in friendly conversation with Joseph Stalin. Eldon C. Hill (1978, p.139) in his biography of George Bernard Shaw writes that after his return, his enthusiasm about the Soviet Union was 'almost unbounded.'

Marshal Zhukov in his (1991) book From Moscow to Berlin, describes his frequent interactions with Marshal Stalin that convey the picture of Stalin as determined, intelligent person with profound knowledge and objective judgment of both of his allies and his enemies.

An emerging view
Claire Bigg (St. Petersburg Times, March 7, 2003) writes that a recent poll over 50 per cent of respondents saw Stalin's role in history as positive and relates an interview with an elderly Russian woman, excerpted as follows.

We had a happy childhood under Stalin. We had good schools, were brought up well and had great teachers. There were no street kids. And now, under the capitalists, you see them everywhere.

In a sequel to her 2003 article, Claire Bigg (2005) reports that Stalin’s popularity is growing at an unprecedented rate. The city council of Volgograd is considering restoring the city's previous name, Stalingrad. Three cities have announced plans to restore monuments to Stalin that were pulled down and nostalgia for the Golden Age of the Soviet Union under the administration of Premier Stalin is receiving an increasingly receptive audience among younger Russians, disillusioned by market economy and Western values.

Recently released Soviet archival materials related to Joseph Stalin were excerpted by Robert Service (2005) in his Stalin: A Biography, where he shows the astonished reader that so much vilified Stalin wrote sensitive poetry, inspired loyalty, and was a caring father. The Publishers Weekly comments that

Most previous biographers have depicted Stalin as a plodding figure whose only distinguishing characteristic was brutality. But Service describes a man who was intelligent and hardworking and who learned from experience. On so many of the complex issues of Soviet history Service provides lucid accounts based on his own research and the most recent scholarship. Stalin was the key figure behind every major development from the mid-1920s onward. He based his policy decisions on a realistic assessment of his own often uneasy position and of the Soviet Union's relatively weak standing in the world.

After President Bush, in 2007, unveiled a monument to the victims of communism in Washington and compared communism to modern terror groups, Premier Putin commented that many of the war crimes of the United States were worse than the abuses of Stalin. "We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population," he said. "We have not sprayed thousands of kilometers with chemicals, or dropped on a small country seven times more bombs than in all the World War II."

Notes
Recently, the on-line magazine Kvali published Stalin's poem 'Morning' which opens with verses, evoking vivid images of the Georgian landscape:

See Also
Llano Estacado
Stalin's Biography
Pharaoh

References
Bigg, C.(2003), Fifty Years On, Russia Still Divided on Stalin. St. Petersburg Times, March 7.
Bigg, C.(2005) Russia: Is the country pinning for Stalin? Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May12.
Hill, E. C. (1978) George Bernard Shaw. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Kahan, S. (1987) The Wolf of the Kremlin. New York: William Morrow.
Prus, B. (1895) Pharaoh. Hippocrene Books (2003) ISBN 0781809622.
Robeson, P. & Foner, P.S. (1978) Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974. Brunner-Routlege.
Service, R. (2005) Stalin: A Biography. Belknap Press.
Sundquist, E. J. (1996) The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. Oxford University Press.
Zhukov, G. K. (1991) From Moscow to Berlin. Costa Mesa, CA; The Noontide Press.