From The Belmont Club:
...If the evidence of totalitarian behavior means anything, then tyrants as a whole act like individuals matter. They don’t believe in ants. They fear men. Their entire apparatus of control is designed entirely to suppress individuals, lest one act of solitary freedom touch off a blaze.
Although it was Anatoly Rybakov, in his book, Children of Arbat, who attributed to Stalin words he never said: “death solves all problems — no man, no problem”, Stalin himself said something similar. He regretted that Ivan the Terrible showed any mercy to women or children.
One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to overlook the five great feudal families. If he had annihilated those five families, there would definitely have been no Time of Troubles. But Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!
There in different words is the same message. “No man, no problem.”
Very true.
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