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Benefiting from the exceptional moment of Marxist internationalism in a realm usually dominated by ethnic Russians, this Caucasian, pockmarked and compact, with a withered arm, a Marxist-Leninist fanatic who always spoke Russian with a heavy accent, now ruled the tsar’s empire. But within the Party Stalin’s comrades mocked his obscurity, challenged his dictatorship, questioned his collectivization and, he believed, encouraged his manic-depressive wife, Nadezhda, to commit suicide. If Russia faced a new war against Hitler, Stalin needed to enforce total supremacy. Killing was his way to do it. ‘Our system,’ he told a confidant, ‘is bloodletting,’ later explaining that his method was ‘quicker but requires more blood’.

Five months after the Night of the Long Knives, on 1 December 1934, Stalin’s ally and Leningrad (formerly Petrograd) leader Sergei Kirov was assassinated, most likely by an unstable comrade whose wife he had seduced – though it also possible that Stalin organized it. Always a master improviser, Stalin took emergency powers and launched a Terror, ordering arrests, deportations and killings to purge the Party not just of traitors but even of those who might think disloyal thoughts. Terror was part of the DNA of the Communist Party; autocracy was part of the DNA of the Russian state; and killing was Stalin’s essential political tool but also part of a personality shaped by his underground life, the savagery of the civil war and, above all, by the experience of power and insecurity in the Kremlin. Dictatorship makes its own monsters. The bizarre mayhem of the Terror was the creation of all of these, driven by Stalin’s ferocious darkness, implacable will, political skill and his cool but totally reckless violence. No great power has ever mutilated itself in such an extraordinary frenzy of chaos and murder. Suspicious of veteran Bolsheviks and generals, Stalin orchestrated a national witch-hunt, staging melodramatic show trials at which respected leaders confessed to outlandish plots. He and his NKVD commissar, a dwarfish myrmidon called Nikolai Yezhov, drew up death lists known as ‘albums’ of thousands of comrades whom Stalin often knew intimately; meanwhile hundreds of thousands of unnamed victims, singled out via quotas of place, race and background, were also targeted: in the ‘national operations’, Poles and Koreans were decimated; within the republics, the terror hit Ukrainians most intensely. The vindictive torture of old enemies, the killing of friends and families and the paranoid scenarios of lurid conspiracies all reflected the strangeness of Stalin himself, but he believed that terror was the only way to ensure total loyalty. ‘Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away,’ he said. ‘When you chop wood, chips fly.’ During his reign, eighteen million innocents passed through the atrocious GULAG camps. Starting from a mere 79,000 slave labourers in 1930, rising to a million in 1935 and around seven million by 1938, these slaves toiled on canals or in mines; yet, as in the American south, slavery was not only diabolical but economically inefficient. During 1936–8, a million victims were officially liquidated but real numbers were much higher. Forty thousand officers were executed, including three out of the five marshals. The total killed during Stalin’s rule will never be known but it was probably close to twenty million.

Watching Stalin’s self-destructive ‘meatgrinder’, Hitler was convinced that the Soviet Union had been severely weakened. He revelled in the messianic mystical union of Volk und Führer, performing at vast theatrical rallies at Nuremberg. ‘Once in the days of yore you heard the voice of a man,’ Hitler told the rally in September 1936, ‘and … it awakened you, and you followed it … When we meet here we are suffused with wonder at our coming together. Not all of you can see me, and I can’t see all of you. But I can feel you, and you can feel me.’

ETHIOPIA WITH OR WITHOUT ETHIOPIANS: HAILE SELASSIE AND MUSSOLINI

In December 1934, as the Führer turned to Europe and Stalin launched his Terror, the Duce turned to Ethiopia to avenge Adowa.

Five years earlier, its thirty-seven-year-old regent, Ras Tafari, had been crowned as Negus Negust Haile Selassie in St George’s, Addis, a ceremony attended for the first time by guests from all the European powers, designed to dazzle with traditional Ethiopian glory and independent modernity. Haile Selassie annexed the last of the Muslim sultanates and created a constitution with an assembly that established an absolutist monarchy.^* But Ethiopia’s position between Italian Eritrea and Somaliland made it an ideal place to launch Mussolini’s new Roman empire.

‘Only he and I knew what was going to happen,’ boasted General Emilio De Bono, promising the Duce that its conquest ‘wouldn’t be difficult’.

‘Full speed ahead,’ ordered Mussolini.