In his army, the mustachioed dictator quipped, “It takes more courage to retreat than to advance.”
It was his trademark brand of gallows humor, usually delivered with a smirk — and a fatal punch line. His generals (at least the ones who hadn’t already been shot) got the message.
For his legions, probable death lay ahead in battle with better-equipped opponents. But for any soldier who so much as turned his head, certain death waited behind from the pistols of political officers. Surviving prisoners of war who came home were shot as traitors or sent to prison camps. Few ever saw their families again.
Terrorizing the military was just one part of an all-encompassing social climate of dread. The dictator cultivated fear to crush any hint — real or imagined — of resistance to his rule.
Saddam Hussein? No, though the similarities are striking. These methods were perfected by one of Saddam’s reputed heroes: a failed seminary student from Georgia named Iosif Dzhugashvili — later known to the world as Joseph Stalin.
He died 50 years ago March 5, safe in his bed, after spilling oceans of blood. It’s a grimly ironic legacy for a poor boy from a provincial backwater of the Czarist Russian empire. His mother wanted him to be an Orthodox priest. He would later order the execution, imprisonment or exile of thousands of priests and millions of believers. He attempted to destroy every vestige of religious faith — while creating a personality cult that verged on worship.
“O great Stalin, O leader of the peoples,” proclaimed a psalm-like tribute from one of his many craven Davids. “Thou who broughtest man to birth, … O thou, Sun reflected by millions of hearts.”
“Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs,” Stalin once sneered. Perhaps his most chilling maxim, however, was this: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” That genocidal philosophy became his daily approach to governing.
Long before the terror reached the highest levels in the late 1930s, Stalin deliberately engineered a terror famine in the Ukraine that starved up to 7 million human beings — simply to impose collective farming and crush a proud people.
Why remember these crimes? Because only half a century after Stalin’s death — and little more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union — they are largely forgotten. That is itself a crime against Stalin’s victims. Forgetting also makes it easier for Stalin’s many imitators to use his methods elsewhere, as they have done to this day.
We sorely need to reaffirm in our own troubled time that God still rules the nations — despite the men who try to break them. The Lord doesn’t cause the suffering inflicted by despots, but He brings good out of it for His purposes.
God prevailed in the days of Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Caesar. He prevailed in the days of Stalin. No matter how many tyrants and terrorists rage in our day, He will prevail again.
Historical accounts of tyrants such as Stalin prove ‘God prevails’
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