History, as we all know, tends to favor the victors of wars. This in part explains why two of the greatest architects of 20th Century genocide, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, have been treated very differently in the more than 50 years since they held power. Hitler is so universally reviled that he canceled his own first name. Stalin on the other hand is presented as a more complicated and nuanced figure. It’s not just that Stalin’s Soviet Union defeated Hitler and Germany (with Allied help), Uncle Joe also had powerful and smart friends in the West, high among them was the celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.
In fairness to Shaw, at least in his younger days, the Soviet Union, and before it, Russia in general held a heady appeal to Western artists. Even prior to the Bolsheviks, the pump had already been primed, in theater by the plays of Chekov and the directing style of Stanislavski, and in literature more generally, Tolstoy, who at the start of the 20th Century was wildly praised and mimicked. So it was natural for Shaw, himself a socialist with progressive ideas, to see the USSR not as a red menace, but as a hope for humanity.
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