SSM: Russia is very different because, of course, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and he was thrown out of the Mausoleum in 1961.But something very strange has happened because Stalin regarded himself both as a sort of Red Tsar and as the supreme pontiff of Marxism, but the Marxism bit has fallen away. Communism was chucked out and the present regime is not by any means Communist. But it’s very imperial, it’s very obsessed with state power in a way that Stalin would still have understood. Stalin was utterly denounced in the early 1990s, all his crimes revealed, all archives opened, which show things in absolutely naked terms — lists of people killed, by the hundreds of thousands and millions, at random. Everyone has forgotten that now, and in the early 21st century we see the great irony: this Georgian-born internationalist is gradually becoming the symbol of Russian power, Russian imperial success.

If you talk to people, not just old people but young people, of Putin’s generation, for example, and younger, they see Stalin as the most successful Russian leader. This is a quote from a Putin-endorsed textbook which says “Stalin was the most successful Russian leader of the 20th century” — which of course is undeniably true if you measure power in the same way that you’d measure Genghis Khan as a great success in the old-fashioned way that people used before the 20th century, before we introduced moral measurements for such matters. And the textbook also says that Stalin had to use terror just to make sure that the bureaucracy and the elite obeyed orders. The empire he left, stretching from Berlin to Mongolia, was larger than any tsar’s. And so I think Stalin, this Georgian who wasn’t even Russian, will end up being “Stalin the Great” in Russian textbooks. I thought it would take 50 years but it’s happening now.

JC: Yes; in China our book has been published in pirated editions, and people have also scanned it on to websites for people to download, and so there are a lot of comments on the book. And while many say how awful Mao was, there are also people saying basically what you said Russians say about Stalin: “But Mao gave us the atom bomb” as though the deaths of tens of millions were worth it because we had the atom bomb.