By Ravi Shankar Etteth
12 May 2012 10:30:00 PM IST
Death by assassination
Mythology and ideology have similar plots. Both gods and leaders cheat. They use brute force, intrigue and mystical curses to win their battles. Mortals worship them and suffer. This is, in a nutshell, the supper theater of history.
The denouement of a new play—a murder mystery—is that Josef Stalin murdered Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
The world's surviving Communists would be outraged at the suggestion that Stalin murdered the big daddy of the revolution. Wait. History differentiates between assassination and murder. Murder, however most foul, is banal; a personal crime inspired by base motives. Assassinations are imbued with dark grandeur; they mark the fall of empires and leaders.
Last week, The New York Times reported on a medical conference in which doctors reviewed Lenin's death. Dr Lev Lurie, a prominent Russian historian invited to the conference described Russia of the early 1920s as a land of "mafia-like intrigue". Papers kept in Soviet archives, opened to researchers after the USSR's fall, showed that this was true. In 1921, plagued by his deteriorating health, Lenin wrote to Gorky, "I am so tired, I do not want to do anything at all." However, the ailing Lenin was also planning to politically eliminate Stalin. Perhaps, even a brutal leader like Lenin saw the bloodlust in his disciple. Stalin was aware of this. A top-secret note written in 1923 by Stalin to the Soviet Politburo claimed that Lenin requested Stalin to kill him. "On Saturday, March 17th, in the strictest secrecy, Comrade Krupskaya told me of 'Vladimir Ilyich's request to Stalin', namely that I, Stalin, should take the responsibility for finding and administering to Lenin a dose of potassium cyanide. I felt it impossible to refuse him, and declared: 'I would like Vladimir Ilyich to be reassured and to believe that when it is necessary I will fulfill his demand without hesitation'." Though Stalin said he couldn't do it, Dr Lurie felt the "absolutely ruthless" Georgian might nevertheless have poisoned Lenin.
Many famous assassins have been close confidantes of kings. When Brutus killed Caesar, it made history and Shakespeare. Members of the Praetorian Guard, expressly charged with the emperor's safety, killed Caligula. Commodus was also their victim. Agrippina, the niece and wife of the emperor Claudius, poisoned him. Ancient historian Justin suspects Alexander's hand in the death of his father, Philip of Macedonia. King Nader Shah's soldiers slew him. Aurangazeb annihilated his brothers. Assassination is politics by other means. Their aftermath can be deadly: the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked off World War I. Indira Gandhi's death, at the hands of her Praetorian Guard, led to one of the worst pogroms in modern Indian history; and also the birth of terrorism in India.
Yet, there is a difference between a democracy and a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union. Just like the public execution of Marie Antoinette made mass murder state policy, the death of Lenin put on history's terrible stage one of the most brutal, psychotic killers of all time: Josef Stalin. The butcher famously declared that the death of one man is a tragedy, and the death of millions is a statistic.
Assassinations are often succeeded by revolutions, that end with the elegiac statistics of a million tragedies. It is then that gods are unmasked.
Ravi@newindianexpress.com
© Copyright 2008 ExpressBuzz
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"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those who understand enough
to be afraid and yet retain their fury."
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