Search results for ""Author James Greensmith""

On 1 October 1939, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty and soon to be the UK's wartime leader, described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. The same can certainly be said of Stalin. How can this paradox of a man, who on the one hand had once exhibited great tenderness and kindness to his daughter Svetlana, and on the other sent millions - including members of his own family - to their deaths, be explained? It is impossible to quantify the total number of deaths attributable to the policies of Stalin, but the Excess Mortality' (i.e., deaths over and above what would normally have been expected during the period in question) gives an approximate figure in excess of 40 million. However, this is only part of the story of the amount of misery inflicted by the Stalin regime through torture, deliberate starvation, neglect, separation from loved ones, cold and hypothermia (e.g. in the prisons of Siberia), which is unquantifiable and unimaginable. Svetlana confessed that she would never undertake to explain what motivated all my father's actions, simply because I do not possess the psychological genius of [Russian novelist] Dostoevsky, who knew how to penetrate into another man's soul and examine it from within '.

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Following the celebrations of the Millennium and our entry into the 21st century, it was to be hoped that the days when a brutal dictator could bring mindless death and destruction to another country, and even to his own people, were over, and that the lessons of the past had been well and truly learned. A forlorn hope, as it transpires, for yet another monster has raised its ugly head above the slimy cesspit which such monsters inhabit, one to rival those of the past such as Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot. For now, we have Vladimir Putin, a depraved, deranged, warmongering megalomaniac who threatens the peace of the entire planet. In former times the appropriate description of Putin would have been 'evil'; 'a monster'; 'the Devil incarnate'; 'ghoulish', 'an excrescence', etcetera, but we no longer live in the Middle Ages and such appellations no longer suffice. And anyway, what adjective exists to describe a person who has no respect for human life? In their place we have the terminology of modern-day psychiatry. So, is it possible to get inside the mind of Putin and discover what makes this ruthless, brutal, and amoral dictator 'tick'? The answer is 'Yes', but it is not to be found in any textbook of psychiatry. Instead, the clues are to be found in a scientific paper, published by a female psychiatrist as long ago as the year 1997, and in the known side effects of the illness from which he is currently suffering. A new and unique insight is now offered into the mind of Putin, one which has not previously been advanced.

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