Yes. Good time for a reminder that
Political Ponerology was written with the Soviet Union as its exemplar of pathocracy.
It's also
true.
There are plenty. You can go the revisionist approach and either ignore or rationalize all the evil, or you can look at both and see that Stalin's era (following on Lenin) was one of Russia's darkest. So dark that many would prefer to pretend it couldn't have been that bad. I don't mean to invoke Godwin's law here, but this is exactly what revisionists of a certain other 20th-century pathocracy tend to do: focus on all the great things that guy did for his country, and paint over all the evil as either non-existent, necessary, or not really his fault. There comes a time when you just have to call a spade a spade. Stalin may not have been the worst guy ever, but he was pretty darn bad.
I've heard that kind of sentiment a lot in defense of Stalin: he may have been a hard man, but he's what Russia needed to 'advance'. In any other context, a person of Stalin's character would be called: a tyrant of a boss, a slave-driving, abusive father, or a ruthless capitalist (if he used the same tactics in a corporate environment). To think that Russians couldn't advance without a leader like Stalin is to think fairly poorly of Russians, IMO. One could say, better to be ruled by a ruthless characteropath than a weakling. Maybe. Doesn't change the fact that the person in question is a ruthless characteropath.
Have you considered that the USSR was perhaps just as much of a trial run? They were far more successful in implementing a long-lasting pathocracy based on an anti-human ideology.
Yep. As an example of the mental gymnastics some defenders of Stalin go through, see this:
I'm currently reading a new book by Russian-American military expert Andrei Martyanov, Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning. It's a great book. The writing is clunky at times and could have used an editor to smooth...
www.sott.net
I'd just add that I don't think Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao were
psychopaths, technically. Lobaczewski would say "frontal characteropathy", which nowadays would be referred to as right-prefrontal dysfunction, a borderline personality feature. Barb Oakley has a good term for it: borderpathy.
The one advantage he has was that he probably wasn't a total psychopath. But tell that to a child of a borderline parent - it's small comfort.
Some further reading:
'Top Down vs. Bottom-up: Regarding the Potential of Contemporary “Revisionism”'
In 2013, Oxford University Press published a collection of articles about Stalinist repression, edited by James Harris, and based on a conference at Leeds University in 2010. This new collection of...
journals.openedition.org
"Once More About ‘Putin’s Rehabilitation of Stalin'"
by Gordon M. Hahn UPDATE 2: Here is another update on the myth promoted in the West and Russian liberal circles that the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin is actively rehabilitating the im…
gordonhahn.com