The Maddest and Most Criminal of Tyrants - 20 June 2003

Soon after I first arrived in the United States I was invited to stay with a Boston family that I'd met on the ship coming over, the good ship Laconia.

A fine, I should have said then, middle-aged couple - they were not a day under 40 - with an adorable, blonde, 16-year-old daughter and a small, sassy, jeering, 12-year-old son, the like of which I had never met till then or since.

Once he was sent away from the table for making a rude sound, which startled me, and when he came back he said to me: "You mean you never gave your headmaster a raspberry?"

I'm sure he turned out to be a fine young man but he was then simply a brat at an impossible age.

He dawdled with his food and he finally pushed it aside.

"Chester," his mother scolded, "finish your plate. Think of the starving Armenians."

I never gave this episode a thought until it must have been 1990 - 13 years ago - when I saw on television a rather shocking domestic scene.

It was a family around a dinner table with folded hands, the tots glancing at their elders for the cue to the speech or the prayer they seemed to be chanting.

It was, we were told, a vow of ill-will, to put it mildly, towards the Turks for generations to come.

What I was seeing was something I'm sure I couldn't have seen in England, it was a gathering of Americans of Armenian extraction commemorating and bemoaning the 75th anniversary of what was simply described in the history books as "The Turkish massacres".

It's a terrible story.

Armenia has been throughout its history a chaos of parties, religions, tribes, nationalist movements all kept in ferment by intruding powers - the Romans, the Russians, the Greeks, in 1915 - the year of the massacres - by the Turks.

1915 was a fierce and bloody time during the First World War. The Turks were fighting on the German side and suspected that the Armenians had many, too many, agents, too much sympathy for the Allies - Britain, France, Russia especially.

So the Turks decided on a breathtaking move of Roman audacity - they ordered and ran the removal of the entire Armenian population - about one and three quarter millions - from their own country into Syria and what is now Iraq.

Need I say the resistance was as fervent as it was unavailing. Along the enforced road 600,000 Armenians were massacred.

The thunder of this dreadful event was still rumbling through American life 20 years later and the American Red Cross was still trying to save from starvation another half million Armenian refugees.

All this, scarcely heard about by the average Briton, was at the back of the mind - in my early days - of any American parent urging a child to "finish your plate".

I don't believe this memory would have been awakened if it had not been suddenly roused by a piece in the paper this week about a protest parade by a nationwide group I frankly didn't know existed - the Society of Ukrainian Americans.

Like the Armenians, commemorating with similar public show and anger, they were commemorating a more dreadful event still.

This past week it seems marked the 70th anniversary of the forced starvation of what we then called The Ukraine.

What is a forced starvation? Ask the untroubled spirit of Josef Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union for almost 30 years.

By the late 1920s, Stalin was ready and all-powerful enough to put into practice a plan, two plans.

One was the modernising of industry and the second was making every farmer, big or small, prospering or failing, surrender his property to collective ownership.

That's to say every farm was to be nationalised and the party - the Bolsheviks in Moscow through their regional chiefs - would convert every farmer into an indentured servant, labouring for the common harvest which would be then apportioned according to your loyalty to the party.

From the beginning this was a personality problem for Stalin.

Since his youth he'd been paranoid. From his first days in the party he had his eyes alert, his ears cocked, all his senses psychotically roused to spot a traitor.

In practice this meant that in a factory a poor timekeeper, a man who couldn't quite handle new machinery, anyone whose machine broke down was identified as a traitor and shot.

The farm collective plan had a mightier obstacle - more than 70% of the so-called proletariat were peasants, most of whom hated losing their farms to a local bureaucrat.

The Ukraine was a very bounteous region, the wheat bowl for half the Soviets. Its tough, independent farmers instigated a massive revolt against collectivisation.

Stalin knew exactly what to do - no negotiations, no compromise - he simply ordered the army to seize the peasants' food and their stored seed.

1933 was the first year of Stalin's triumph in enforcing his collectivist plan.

In shorter words - in that year 4.2 million Ukrainians starved to death, another 1.7 millions were driven away to outdoor threadbare camps and left for the perishing winter to kill them off.

No Western reporter that I've heard about managed to get a word about the Ukraine through to his/her paper.

We did read of public trials of journalists, party officials, intellectuals, who were said to have conspired against the party and some of them certainly had but all of them were - as the polite word had it - liquidated.

In London Mr Bernard Shaw commented: "Stalin was quite right, he was surrounded by enemies."

Stalin could not have agreed more, he was obsessed by the fear of assassination.

At Yalta, whereas Roosevelt had two bodyguards and Churchill one detective, Stalin lived and travelled with an entire Russian division of soldiers and security men.

He slept by day - daylight was too risky a time to expose oneself.

He arose in the early evening, sat down and - sipping his first vodka - began, what I once called, his twilight signatures - execution orders: today a brother-in-law, tomorrow burn up six villages, next day on a tip from an ambassador that two Russian officers were plotting together, just to be on the safe side, Stalin wrote an order condemning 2,000 officers above the rank of colonel to be shot at dawn and so they were.

Some time after the second war foreign offices began to compute just how many humans Stalin had ordered killed. Nothing to do with World War II casualties.

The British guessed perhaps seven, eight millions.

Progressive liberal people in both Britain and America were reluctant to believe that he'd ever executed anybody except genuine, dangerous party plotters.

The US State Department, of course riddled with its fear of Communism, its guess was 20 millions. What rubbish.

Not until the collapse of Communism in 1991 did the Russians open up their own archives. The correct, Kremlin figure was 27 millions.

How did it come about then that ordinary, decent, well-informed Americans and Britons who were not rampaging Tories came to share a common view of the two dictators?

Hitler seen as a madman and a monster, Stalin as a very strict and - yes - perhaps a ruthless leader whenever conspirators were involved but a man not capable of Hitler's hideous holocaust.

This view was held among decent, progressive, liberal people throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s, and among many people it was held right through until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I believe there were two reasons - especially during and after the second war - for Stalin's appearing as a rather frightening disciplinarian rather than, which he was, the maddest and most criminal of tyrants.

The sheer scale, the magnitude of Stalin's crimes once rumoured about defied sensible belief.

But more so than anything else, I think, was his propaganda triumph about an absolute rule can be broken only on pain of instant death.

No film, no photographs of conditions anywhere could be published until censored.

Everything must be locked away - every image of the slave labour camp, torture chamber, execution squad, even pictures of the daily, dreary life of the people, the daily bread and soap queues, everything except the model farms dolled up for showing off to foreign visitors.

In the end, put it this way: is there a listener who has not seen a hundred sickening times the clanking skeletons of Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz?

But have you ever seen a single picture of a company of colonels dead on the ground, of a whole horizon of burning villages and their smoking corpses, of the execution of a favourite general, a son-in-law, of any of the Kremlin's listed 27 millions?

In the result we see Hitler with his mad, sincere vision of a perfect Nordic race.

By comparison with Stalin - the paranoiac of the century - Hitler was a demented boy scout.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.