The totalitarian mind
The cult of a dictator feeds on the dissolution of the self
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: God’s capitalists; Confucius: the first humanist; Pascal’s wager.
Question: What was your assessment of Stalin?
Fedorova: I had very high regard of him . . . [He] was a great man . . . He united people . . . no one could create those faces [in the Kino-Chronicle, a news service], those smiling faces, those joyful faces artificially.
Question: Weren’t the millions killed and sent to the gulags a blot on the record?
Fedorova: It was a dark stain, but I’ll repeat once more that the country was working . . . The factories were working, children were studying at schools . . . the country was growing.
Question: This terrible stain did not undermin…