Fragments 2
1.
“Because he did not elucidate and elaborate his views and plans, it was thought that he did not have any […]. He would listen quietly at meetings of the Politburo, or to distinguished visitors, puffing at his Dunhill pipe and doodling aimlessly—his secretaries Poskrebyshev and Dvinsky write that his pads were sometimes covered with the phrase ‘Lenin-teacher-friend,’ but the last foreigner to visit him, in February 1953, noted that he was doodling wolves.”
2.
“When he had nothing else to do, he would contemplate his own greatness. It was gratifying to have so inexhaustible a subject.”
3.
“He made a great show of expecting the people he questioned to provide him enlightenment, but the show was a sham. He was insincere in the enthusiasm with which he greeted their complacent responses, and he was insincere in the disappointment he expressed when their answers were invalidated in a sad little pop of self-contradiction. He was convinced, even before he heard the specifics of their answers, that the people he questioned didn’t know what they were talking about, and his questioning was designed to convince them of the same.”
4.
“But he did not win every argument. Johan Molander, the Swedish Ambassador, remembered a small, private lunch in the Kremlin, which Putin gave for King Carl XVI Gustaf. Putin wanted to get the King to discuss the first Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea, which was then in the planning stages and would provide Russian natural gas to Germany. The King, who had an engineering degree but was also an ardent ecologist, refused to be drawn. ‘He ducked,’ Molander remembered. ‘What he did was to give an extremely knowledgeable, extremely detailed and very boring lecture on the ecology of the Baltic Sea. He started with the algae, then the herring and the cod, all the way up the food chain. Putin was sitting there, obviously thinking: Why do I have to put up with this idiot? But he’s the King and there’s nothing I can do. So he started making a pyramid out of breadcrumbs. After a while he started to eat them, until, finally, the King came to a conclusion.’ At that point, Molander thought, the King had finished. But then he launched into a new theme: the need for double-hulled ships to transport oil in order to protect the ecology of the Baltic. ‘It was a memorable meal.’”
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968)
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852)
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (2014)
Philip Short, Putin (2022)
