JC: Yes. Mao really seems to have had a heart of stone. I was astonished interviewing people close to Mao at the total indifference he had towards his family. There is this story which we have in our book of when his son died. His eldest and only mentally normal son died in the Korean war and Mao didn’t show any sign of sadness. Then for two and a half years this news was not broken to the son’s young widow, who spent all her weekends and her vacations with Mao. She didn’t ask why she didn’t get any letters because she was used to communist secrecy, but also because Mao showed no sign that indicated to her that something had happened to her husband. For two and a half years Mao talked about his son from time to time, and even joked about him, as though he was talking about somebody who was alive; so she had no clue that her husband was dead.

I was puzzled about this at first until I realised that Mao probably didn’t tell her because he found her company relaxing. Mao didn’t want somebody who was miserable for company, so he didn’t tell her.

SSM: One thing that was really unforgivable in Stalin’s court was when people were alone with him and they were suddenly tempted to mention that one of their people had been arrested and appeal for their release — that was just absolute death, because he was relaxing and it was absolutely unacceptable for anyone to show any bitterness, no matter what had happened. In fact there was one great scene where Stalin visited Kavtaradze’s family, and the wife had been tortured, almost to death, and the husband had been sentenced to death and then let off, and he came in and asked, “did they torture you” and she said, “yes”, and he said, “well, there are a lot of yes-men in our country”. And then he said, “but how do you feel about that?”, and that was a great cue because if she’d said she was bitter about any part of it, I’m sure she would have been arrested again within days. But she was clever and said, “Let’s strike out the eye of any­one who holds any grudges at all about this.” She outlived Stalin.

Stalin is always regarded as this kind of impassive, grey person with no expression, no personality — that was his image, the man of steel. But actually when you look at him — and I think this is the same with Mao, in the sense that they were both great melodramatists — he had a great sense of theatre and his own performance, and I think when tragedies happened, he loved to play the role. In his old age Stalin loved Westerns. He loved John Wayne and I think that’s really how he saw himself. He really loved these movies because he saw himself as a man with no name riding into a town with nothing but a rifle to dispense justice with, a man with no family and no one who loved him.

JC: Self-pity.

SSM: Lonesome self-pity, but a man of justice who gave justice brutally and then rode out of town. That was really how he saw himself in history and that was his romanticisation of his own heartlessness.