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There was a certain inevitability to the darkness that existed between the two superpowers in the years immediately after World War II—two essentially isolationist countries propelled involuntarily to great power status, with vastly differing political and economic systems, each with its own historical strain of paranoia and each now living in a nuclear world. But no small additional part of the tension was the fact that the Soviet leader was Stalin, and he made everything in the Cold War seem infinitely more dangerous and more threatening, so marginal was his innate humanity, and so cruel a man was he. What he ran was a terror machine. It did not matter if you had committed a crime; a suitable crime could always be found for you. It did not matter if you were a completely loyal Communist and a completely faithful Stalinist, a true believer in the cult of his personality. Someone was always listening, ready to betray you, if only to save himself. It was government run by fear and, finally, madness. In the late 1930s, with a Slavophobic Hitler on the rise, Stalin had purged and virtually destroyed the officer corps and leadership of the Red Army, getting rid of 3 of 5 marshals, 15 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders. Essentially he stripped his country’s defenses and prepared the way for the German invasion to come in 1941. His crimes against his own people were so great as to be essentially beyond measurement. How many people had actually died? Was it a few million, 10 million, perhaps even 40 million? “He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine tenths of the human race to ‘make happy’ the one tenth,” wrote Milovan Djilas, the former Communist vice president of Yugoslavia, and heir apparent to Tito, who broke with the Communists, spent time in prison, and eventually wrote one of the most penetrating early insider portraits of Stalin. Djilas saw him as the greatest criminal of all time: “Every crime was possible to Stalin for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure…to him will fall the glory the greatest criminal in history. For in him were joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.”
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
He had noticed, however, that when reports of a battle were printed, his newspapers sold faster than on other days, and then he could barely carry enough copies of the papers to the train. He therefore made it his practice to go to the composing room of the Detroit Free Press and inquire what the headlines were on the advance galley proofs for that day’s edition, so that he might better estimate his needs. Necessity and early experience in hawking produce had given him a shrewd commercial sense. One day in April, 1862, the first accounts of an immense and sanguinary battle between the armies of Grant and Johnston at Shiloh reached the newspaper office by telegraph. Learning of this before the newspaper was out (and before the evening train left for Port Huron), the trainboy conceived the idea of a splendid little stroke of business for himself. The proofs he had seen showed that the Free Press would carry huge display heads announcing a battle in which 60,000 were then believed to have been killed and wounded! Here was a chance for enormous sales, if only the people along the line could know what had happened. Suddenly an idea occurred to me. I rushed off to the telegraph operator and gravely made a proposition which he received just as gravely. At Edison’s request, a short bulletin was to be wired by the Detroit train dispatcher to the railroad stations along the road to Port Huron, and the telegraphers there would be asked to chalk them up on bulletin boards in the depots, before the train arrived. For this free telegraph service Tom Edison would pay the friendly Detroit telegrapher with gifts of some merchandise, newspapers, and magazine subscriptions. Thus forearmed, the boy went to the office of the newspaper’s managing editor, Wilbur F. Storey, to ask for a thousand copies of the paper, an uncommonly large assignment, since usually he took but two hundred, and he asked for this on credit. He had boldly marched up to Mr. Storey himself, because the man in charge of distribution had rebuffed him. The managing editor examined the ragged boy whose expression, however, was resolute enough. “I was a pretty cheeky boy, and felt desperate,” he himself recalled later. The authorization was given him and, with the help of another boy, he lugged huge bundles of the newspaper to the train and folded them up. His device of having advance bulletins telegraphed and posted at the depots worked even better than he had hoped. In his own vivacious way Edison related: When I got to the first station on the run... the platform was crowded with men and women. After one look at the crowd I raised the price to ten cents. I sold thirty-five papers. At Mount Clemens, where I usually sold six papers, the crowd was there too... I raised the price from ten cents to fifteen... It had been my practice at Port Huron to jump from the train about one quarter of a mile from the station where the train generally slackened speed. I had drawn several loads of sand to…
What I hadn’t anticipated was the sudden, powerful encounters with people—especially lonely people who looked like they hadn’t connected with anyone in ages. I was amazed by the intimate moments of prolonged eye contact happening on the busy city sidewalk as traffic whizzed by, as sirens blared, as street vendors hawked their wares and activists thrust flyers at every passerby, as bedraggled transients tried to sell the local homeless community newspaper to rushing commuters…where more than a second or two of a direct, silent gaze between strangers is usually verboten. My eyes would say: Thank you. I see you. And their eyes would say: Nobody ever sees me. Thank you.
The Art of Asking
Amanda Palmer and Brené Brown
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