Excerpted from An Interview with historian Jonathan Brent author, INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES: Bourgeois Musings on the leadership of Stalin

Excerpted from Australian Broadcasting Corporation article of
June 8, 2009
An Interview with historian Jonathan Brent author,
INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES

Stalin is back. Who was Stalin? And this is the most
fascinating thing it seems to me. Stalin one day
grabbed his son Vasily, who was going around
proclaiming I am Stalin and bullying his fellow
students and so forth. So Stalin grabbed him when
he got home and he said, "Listen, you are never
to say this again. You are not Stalin he said and
I am not Stalin."

MARK COLVIN: That's a great story in the book;
what do you think it actually, what do you think
he meant? Stalin was not him, who was Stalin then?

JONATHAN BRENT: Stalin was Soviet power.

MARK COLVIN: So it's not who but what.

JONATHAN BRENT: Exactly. But Stalin goes on and
says to Vasily, "Stalin is what is in the
newspapers, what is written in the newspapers and
what's in the portraits". In other words, Stalin
is what is in the minds of the people and once
you realise that, then you realise the incredible
power of Stalin. Because it was not a man, it was
not George Bush, it was not Dick Cheney, it was
not an objective being, it was who was inside of you.

MARK COLVIN: But there was a Stalin and...

JONATHAN BRENT: There was, there was a Stalin.
Well there was a Jughashvili who became Stalin,
but this man, this actual, physical man was not
the core of the mesmerising power that Stalin
exerted over the people of Russia.

MARK COLVIN: And when you read his papers, what
was it about him? Did he manage to somehow
sublimate himself into this image of power?

JONATHAN BRENT: Absolutely. I think that's an
excellent way of putting it. He sublimated
himself into that image of power. He became that power.

It's not enough to say "I am the state". It's not
that I am the state in the sense that what I say
goes for the state, what I am is the thinking of
the state. Rather, it's something much more mystical
I would say with Stalin.

It's the core of why people cannot let go of him
because he represented this tremendous power and
now in Russia, when they feel so powerless with
the destruction of the Soviet Union, with the
carving up of the Soviet empire, with the
degradation of their economy, the degradation of
the people, the poverty of Russia - again today
there are sections within Russia where people
don't use paper money, they use the barter
system, because there is no money and there is
this yearning for the restoration of that power.
I think that explains to a great extent why Stalin
is coming back.