AND HIS NAME WAS JOEY STEEL
Stalin initially called himself Koba, which is like someone calling themselves Robin Hood
I was going to tell a story relating to that name, but I first went to look it up and, as far as I can tell, the story was an anticommunist invention. God fucking damn it everything is a lie.
The story was about “Bukharin’s Last Plea,” which I now cannot find evidence for existing in the archives despite that being exactly where it should be based on the story (having supposedly been found in Stalin’s desk after he died).
Yeah, I’ve heard about that one. Stalin reportedly kept a letter from Bukharin in his desk saying “Koba, why do you need me to die?” kept next to other famous letters like Lenin’s one calling Stalin rude for arguing with Krupskaya, that one where Tito says “please stop sending guys to kill me,” plus a few others that I don’t remember. It’s cartoon villain stuff, saying Stalin kept all his most evil accomplishments close in his desk to bask in their glow or something.
The Bukharin’s last plea thing first got reported in 2006 and its primary source was never found, just reported on by two Russian historians. One of whom is Roy Medvedev, who is one of those weird types of Russians who put their faith in socialism in…Vladimir Putin somehow.
I’m not sure if I’d say that he “puts his faith in socialism” since he was around for plenty of the USSR and was a dissident and antistalinist! Then again, Khrushchev claimed to be a Marxist despite being a fucking collaborationist in terms of professed beliefs, so maybe that’s just the failure of Soviet education in Marxism.
I can believe, if the letter was real, that Stalin would keep it for his entire life due to the guilt, but it doesn’t seem to be or else it would a) have been reported on sooner and b) be in the damn archive! Of course, the two historians give it the cartoon villain characterization you describe except for the Lenin one, which they admit was for a more human reason. I don’t see why he’d even bother with the Tito one except that it (if it was real) would be an excellent show of rhetoric. I think only the Lenin one was real of the three though.
And there are conflicting stories, but in the one that mentions there being five letters, the other two were forgotten by Khrushchev, who was telling this to a third party who told this to the historians, so you remembered all of the ones that were attested.
