From Robert Conquest’s “Stalin, Breaker of Nations” (mentioned in Mockingbird’s interview with Whit Stillman).

One of [Stalin’s] outstanding characteristics was, in many respects, a profound mediocrity melded with a superhuman will-power. It is as though he had a very ordinary brain, but with some lobes extravagantly over-developed, like the horrible skulls in Dali’s early paintings.

On Soviet Psychology: [In] the postwar period, a new Soviet psychology, strongly opposed to Freudian and all other Western schools, accepted the [Ivan] Pavlovian idea, merely adding that the consciousness, as ‘animal’ behavior, could be conditioned by outside pressures, or more…

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