Young Stalin

a talent for terror

At a party with fellow Bolsheviks in their Siberian exile shortly before the revolution, everyone present was asked to name their favorite pleasures. Several mentioned the seduction of women, others chose more politically correct activities in the service of the proletariat. Stalin, who had just seduced and impregnated a 13-year-old girl in the village, chose what was for him a more intense satisfaction:

My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world.