(3 of 5)
"After the war Stalin began to tell all kinds of nonsense about Zhukov, among other things the following: 'You praised Zhukov, but he does not deserve it. It is said that before each operation at the front Zhukov used to behave as follows: he would take a handful of earth, smell it and say, "We can begin the attack," or the opposite, "The planned operation cannot be carried out." ' ... It is possible that Stalin himself invented these things for the purpose of minimizing the role and military talents of Marshal Zhukov."
WARTIME DEPORTATIONS
"Monstrous are the acts whose initiator was Stalin ... the mass deportations from their native places of whole nations, together with all Communists and Komsomols without any exception; this deportation action was not dictated by any military considerations. At the end of 1943 a decision was taken and executed to deport all the Karachai from the lands on which they lived. In the same period, the same lot befell the whole population of the Autonomous Kalmyk Republic. In March 1944 all the Chechen and Ingush peoples were deported and the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was liquidated. In April 1944 all Balkars were deported to faraway places. The Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them."
THE LATER STALIN
"After the war Stalin became even more capricious, irritable and brutal; in particular, his suspicion grew. His persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions . . . This un believable suspicion was cleverly taken advantage of by the abject provocateur and vile enemy Beria, who had murdered thousands of Communists and loyal Soviet people . . . The question arises . . . Why did we not do something earlier, during Stalin's life, in order to prevent the loss of innocent lives? It was because Stalin personally supervised [the purges], and the majority of the Politburo members did not at the time know all of the circumstances . . . and could not therefore intervene."
STALIN THE IGNORANT
"All those who interested themselves even a little in the national situation saw the difficult situation in agriculture, but Stalin never even noted it. Did we tell Stalin about this? Yes, we told him, but he did not support us. Why? Because Stalin never traveled anywhere. He knew the country and agriculture only from films. Many films so pictured kolkhoz [collective] life that the tables were bending from the weight of turkeys and geese. Evidently Stalin thought that it was actually so. The last time he visited a village was in January 1928. How then could he have known the situation in the provinces?"
LITTLE FINGER & TITO
"I recall the first days when the conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia began artificially to be blown up ... I was invited to visit Stalin who, pointing to the copy of a letter lately sent to Tito, asked me, 'Have you read this?' Not waiting for my reply, he answered, 'I will shake my little finger—and there will be no more Tito. He will fall.' "
THE DOCTORS' PLOT