'That Grand Marxist Stalin Did Ten In'

In one of the essential books published in the twentieth century, The Great Terror (1968; rev. 1990, 2008), Robert Conquest (1917-2015) writes matter-of-factly: “We are told in recent Soviet articles that on 12 December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death sentences, and then went to the cinema.” Conquest doesn’t specify what movie the dictator and his toady went to see but among the films released that year, at least in the U.S., were A Day at the Races, The Life of Emile Zola and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Stalin had home movie projection rooms set up in his various residences and we know he was a fan of Tarzan the Ape Man, with Johnny Weissmuller in the starring role, John Ford’s Stagecoach and the films of Charlie Chaplin, including The Great Dictator. 

Most of the books in the category described above are not found in the traditionally defined literary categories; that is, novels, poetry, plays. They tend to be histories and memoirs, most related to communism, and include works by the Mandelstams, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Whitaker Chambers and two rare writers of fiction, Arthur Koestler and Vasily Grossman. Conquest contributes a poem, probably his best-known limerick:

     

“There was a great Marxist called Lenin

Who did two or three million men in.

          That’s a lot to have done in

          But where he did one in

That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.”