The Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets has so far published secret diary fragments of Aleksander Miasnikov, one of the personal physicians of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. According to the doctor, Stalin suffered from a lingering brain disorder that made the dictator paranoid, suspicious and therefore even more murderous than he already was. That writes the British newspaper The Independent.
Miasnikov describes in his diary how he and his colleagues performed an autopsy on the lifeless body of the dictator after Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. “We found a severe form of atheromatosis (clotting of blood vessels). The disease had clearly been developing for several years and may have had a major impact on Stalin's thinking and acting."
The doctor further writes:“Because of his illness, Stalin lost his sense of right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, friend and foe. The affliction I found in Stalin can amplify character traits, making an already suspicious person paranoid.” According to Miasnikov, his country was ruled for years by a critically ill man.
Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with a hard hand from 1928 to 1953. According to estimates by the KGB secret service, 42.3 million people died unnaturally during the time that Stalin was in power. Stalin had masses of civilians deported to Gulags. These were labor camps in inhospitable areas where thousands of people died of hunger, cold and exhaustion. Shortly before his death, Stalin announced the construction of four new megagulags in Siberia. He also announced that he wanted to "cleanse" his army officers again of "enemies of communism".
Miasnikov's diaries—which are no doubt genuine—can help answer one of the greatest questions in recent history:What factors made a dictator like Stalin what he was? In other words:did Stalin commit his crimes completely rationally or were there (also) other things involved?
Beria
More or less simultaneously, diaries of Lavrenti Beria appeared in Russia. From 1941 to 1953 he was the head of the NKVD, the feared internal security service of the Soviet Union. He was the most powerful man in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Beria was known as "the bloodthirsty dwarf" and was a lover of show trials and public executions, among other things. He also regularly assaulted young girls and women. Even Stalin did not like to see his daughter Svetlana near Beria. Naturally, Beria belonged to the small, closed circle around dictator Stalin.
Beria's diaries, which appeared in the Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda but whose authenticity has not yet been established, reveal, among other things, anecdotes about the Second World War.
For example, Beria tells of the visit of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Moscow in August 1942. Beria writes with pride that he advised Stalin to win Churchill's sympathy by getting him drunk. That worked, the prime minister was completely drunk from the vodka and was no longer sure why he had come to Moscow again.
"It is good to know the weakness of your enemies beforehand," Beria noted with satisfaction when Churchill had left again. Shortly after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested and sentenced to death.
Further research has yet to determine whether Beria's diaries are genuine. If that is the case, they provide a unique insight into what it was like in the still closed world at the top of the old Soviet Union.