book reports: ivan and stalin biographies

the new book section of the library beckons me like the sirens and i fell for a newer Stalin biography called Stalin the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore who noted that the widely read Stalin found some inspiration from Ivan the Terrible.
so after reading Stalin i found a 1975 biography by Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff called Ivan the Terrible.

after reading both biographies, i believe it impossible to write about one without looking over the shoulder at the other. both had wives die young, Stalin's by suicide, and both men were predictably damaged. both were ready to quit. regarding Ivan's wife

She died at the wrong time and in the wrong way...Grief, which has struck him so hard, loosened the bonds. Henceforth violence became a way of life; murder was his companion; to see the dead around him was his solace...His character seemed to change overnight. The man who had been deeply religious and conscientious in his duties, carefully weighing the advice of his Chosen Council, acting for ht most part mildly and judicially, rarely giving way to the cruelty that lay just below the surface, suddenly showed himself to be a harsh and tyrannical voluptuary. He lived riotously, drank heavily, surrounded himself with peculators, murderers, thieves, drunkards, and perverts, criminals who had no difficulty recognizing the latent criminality in him. Violent men urged him to hitherto unimaginable feats of violence. ..Like many men who appear to be outwardly bold and fearless, he was in fact very timid, easily terrified, likely to strike out at imagined enemies, at the mercy of uncontrollable fears. What he regarded as his greatest strength - his relentless and passionate determination to rid the world of evil- was in fact his greatest weakness, for he saw evil everywhere, and so there grew in him a monstrous appetite for murder. If necessary, he would destroy all Russia o save tis soul. He succeeded in reducing Russia to a state of timidity, from which it never completely recovered. (pp. 198-199, Ivan)

What would a society look like if run by paranoiacs? Russia, unfortunately, provides a couple examples. It seems that once the killing starts, how can it stop? Isn't the killer rightly deserving of vengeance. The threats, imagined or real, never cease, and the subsequent warping of the soul feeds on itself like a nuclear reaction gone critical.

...there were few satisfactions in living. But he could give himself up to cruelties that excite the nerves and discover strange consolations in the contemplation of people dying in agony. This was the drug he employed to ease the pain of living, and it was provided in abundance by the oprichniki. Terror became his entertainment, and during the following years he destroyed people more ruthlessly and in greater numbers than ever before.
He now stood so far above the laws that it was as though the law had no existence, and so far above the flesh that it was as though flesh and its sorrows had no existence. Torture, which had always fascinated him, now obsessed him. He was continually inventing new and more excruciating forms of torture, while he filled the emptiness of his live with imaginary enemies, imaginary plots, imaginary crimes.
In later years, he would say that the oprichniki had misled him and that he was as much their victim as the innocent people they tortured to death. He claimed he never really ordered those innumerable executions and he would pretend to a grief he had never felt when he wrote to the monasteries asking the monks to pray for the souls of the dead. Finally he would turn against the oprichniki and destroy them as calmly and mechanically as he had destroyed the poor devils who were tortured to death in the cellars of the Oprichina Palace. He had no mercy for anyone, and this total absence of mercy was only another sign of his alienation from the world.
In time a myth grew up that Ivan was pursuing a carefully formulated social and political policy to bring about the annihilation of the boyar class. It was a myth that gave some comfort to Stalin, who was engaged in liquidating the kulaks, the more prosperous peasants who rejected
the idea of working in the collective farms...But in fact Ivan had no understanding of the social forces at work; he destroyed blindly, impassively, scarcely caring who was destroyed, like a maniac. (p.249, Ivan)

Admitting error, was admitting weakness, and admitting weakness meant admitting fallibility, which destabilized support. Stalin's collective farms weren't producing, but the problem, in his mind, couldn't be his idea, it had to be the "wreckers," those saboteurs, who wanted the revolution to fail. It was a convenient label to apply to those who must have hindered his successful ideas, and it was a label that facilitated rounds of terror. Both Tsars employed terror repeatedly. Terror was the method that forced reality to conform to their perception of it. almost randomly, wreckers were identified, arrested and tortured until they confessed to their crimes and implicated their accomplices. For Stalin, terror enabled famine to eventually end, because he no longer had to feed millions of dead wreckers. Terror enabled industrial production because wreckers who weren't tortured to death were worked to death in the gulags only being paid meager starvation rations.

Stalin started out as a seminarian. He dropped out and embraced the atheism of communism. Ivan remained deeply religious his entire life, despite being responsible for perhaps 200,000 deaths?

In an age of religious fervor Ivan was one of the most deeply religious men. He was exuberant in his prayers and utterly devoted to Christ, the Virgin, and his favorite saints. He spent long hours in contemplation of the holy icons, attended al the services of the Orthodox Church, and was continually engaging in theological arguments with the priests attached to his court. When he removed the church bells, icons, and carve doorways from Pskov and Novgorod, and took them into his private keeping in Alexandrova Sloboda, hi appears to have genuinely believed that he had increased his store of divinity. They belonged to him by right of conquest; the question of his right of possession was never raised. Was he not God's anointed, the sole possessor of the Russian land? (p.292, Ivan)

Ivan reminded me of the story of wicked king Ahab of Jewish history, Jezebel's husband. Ahab repented before God at the end of his life, and God spared his judgement on Ahab. Ivan seemed to have regretted all his murders and ordered drawn up a list of all his victims in order that the monks could offer prayers for them. Stalin wasn't without religious devotion, it just wasn't to a higher power, but a higher social order. It seems he was genuinely convinced of the rightness of the "revolution," even though he had to kill millions the revolution was supposed to liberate from the capitalist system.

for whatever cosmic reason, both despots were able to die naturally, in old age, leaving Russia in shambles. what is there to learn from these regents? i think it proves that the human heart is desperately wicked, that men are not inherently good. possessing absolute power is like returning to the garden of eden. these autocrats could either choose restraint or unfettered animal passion. passion is our natural condition. choosing the spiritual when every sense can be tickled in the natural is impossible. as Conrad concludes in The Heart of Darkness, "The horror! The horror!" (p.147)