What's the point of a Hallowe'en without monsters?
When we sort out all of the monsters that have shambled through our imaginations from early childhood, we have to conclude that the scariest were actually human.
Well, sort of....
Among the scariest were Vlad the Impaler, Attila the Hun, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot and Chairman Mao. Each was credited with the deaths of millions of people.
Probably the most monstrous of the lot was Josef Stalin, who died back in '53 and, instead of being pickled like a cuke and preserved under glass like Lenin, was plugged into the Kremlin wall along with some other lesser political notables.
Stalin was recently resurrected in the media at the death of his grandson, Evgeni Dzugashvili. 80-year-old Evgeni died last December. His obit said he spent his lifetime trying to repair his grandpa's severely fractured reputation.
We don't know exactly how Evgeni defended his grandpa's image, but it could not have been easy. Trying to make grandpa Josef's image into something less monstrous than the historic account must have taken some doing.
Compared to him, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny) was a real Boy Scout. While Ivan killed members of his own family as well as anyone within easy reach, Josef is widely viewed as a monster who killed more Russians than Hitler's invading Nazis.
Evgeni's defense of his grandpa's image might have flashed back to when Josef was a teenager; not very tall, not very athletic, with a left arm that didn't easily co-operate when he tried to use it. While not exactly patched together by a Dr. Frankenstein, Josef was said to be quite bright, an avid reader and a good student.
His questionable physical equipment prompted his parents to send him to clerical school. They probably figured he could do with only one useful hand what needed to be done as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church.
But young Josef got into some shady company at the academy--the kind that hatches on almost any college campus today--where the energetic young heroes decide they have the answers to all of mankind's problems even before they learn how to pick up their dirty sox off the floor and put them in the wash.
This gang of radicals saw Karl Marx as their spiritual guide. Their leaders were Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Soon Josef found himself in the eye of the Communist hurricane, doing records and secretarial duties for this bunch of anarchists.
Josef was quick enough to realize he was at the control center of what was happening, with access to information not easily available to the rest of the mob. Quite correctly, he saw this as an advantage.
When the Tsar's family was taken to distant Ekaterinburg and murdered, it should be a fair guess that was the occasion that gave Josef Dzugashvili a scary new perspective. It is possible that he looked with some concern at the squad of killers who calmly walked into a basement room and shot to pieces the Tsar, Tsarina, four young daughters and one little haemophiliac tsarevitch, then disposed of the corpses in secret locations.
Who could blame him if, at that point, he secretly thought to himself, "Is this the kind of murderous scum I'm going to have to identify with from now on?"
It would be surprising if that was not the turning point in young Josef's revolutionary career. So, when Lenin, the man who most likely ordered the Tsar's family execution died, he was ready. He had a plan in place to get Leon Trotsky out of the way and take charge of this dangerous gang of knuckle-dragging primates all by himself, if only for his own safety.
Trotsky's sudden exit in Mexico with an ice pick hammered into his skull was reported on radio one bright August morning in 1940. This left Josef in charge with no challenge to his leadership.
It should be a fair guess that the mass murder of the Tsar's family was the turning point that made mild little Josef Dzugashvili into Josef Stalin, the man of steel.
It is uncertain if this string of events was ever the scenario Evgeni arrived at in his grandpa's defense, but it's a fair guess it might have been, because it is logical.
That ought to be a valid attempt to explain at least one monster lurking in the dark shadows under humanity's collective bedstead this Hallowe'en night.
Note: The Word Tsar in reference to the rulers of Russia is probably incorrect. A more correct translation from the Cyrillic script should probably be Tse-zar, which is closer to Kaiser or Caesar, the Latin term it was borrowed from.
