RUSSIA: Historic Force

Barring the possible existence on earth of undetected saints and major prophets, about the most important person in the world last week was Joseph Vissarionovitch Djugashvili. He was better known to the world as Joseph Stalin, Marshal and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

In Poland and the Reich, his gigantic armies were (in Winston Churchill's feral phrase) "tearing the guts out of the German Army." In the world at large, his ambiguous political purposes were giving the creeps to practically everybody except professional Communists...