Quotations from the article by scholar Stephen Kotkin, "When Stalin Faced Hitler: Who Fooled Whom?"

foreignaffairs.com

Image from article, with caption: A German infantryman walks toward the body of a Soviet soldier and burning Soviet BT-7 tank in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, 1941.

"History is full of surprises."

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"[A]s a teenager, [Stalin] got his poems published in well-regarded Georgian periodicals. ('To this day his beautiful, sonorous lyrics echo in my ears,' one reader would later recall.)"

"He liked colored pencils—blue, red, and green."

"His personal library would ultimately grow to more than 20,000 volumes."

"Among Russian authors, Stalin’s favorite was probably Anton Chekhov ..."

"Film of him walking was prohibited."

"Only a few intimates knew that Stalin suffered nearly constant pain in the joints of his legs, which may have been a genetic condition and which movement partly alleviated."

"[A] narrow circle of Russian physicians had acquired detailed knowledge of his illnesses and of his bodily deformities, including his barely usable left arm, the thick, discolored toenails on his right foot, and the two webbed toes on his left foot (an omen, in traditional Russian folklore, of Satanic influence)."

"Stalin’s stomach was a wreck. He suffered from regular bouts of diarrhea."

"Stalin was a Germanophile."

"Stalin had allowed Lavrenti Beria, the feared head of the secret police, to imprison Poskryobyshev’s [Stalin’s top aide, Alexander Poskryobyshev] beloved wife as a “Trotskyite” in 1939. (Beria had sent a large basket of fruit to their two girls; he then executed their mother.)

"He [Stalin] labeled as 'disinformation' whatever he chose not to believe."

"[General] Zhukov would later recall ... 'And to say out loud that Stalin was wrong, that he is mistaken, to say it plainly, could have meant that without leaving the building, you would be taken to have coffee with Beria.' ”

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"He [Hitler] also frequented the city’s public libraries, where he read ... the fiction of Karl May, set in the cowboys-and-Indians days of the American West or in the exotic Near East."

"Hitler dodged the Austrian draft."

"In April 1919, after Social Democrats and anarchists formed the Bavarian Soviet Republic, the Communists quickly seized power; Hitler, who contemplated joining the Social Democrats, served as a delegate from his battalion’s soviet (council). He had no profession to speak of but appears to have taken part in leftist indoctrination of the troops."

"During his first two weeks in prison [in prison for a failed 1923 attempt to seize power in Munich], Hitler refused to eat, believing he deserved to die, but letters arrived congratulating him as a national hero."

"In his residence in the old Reich Chancellery, Hitler did not sleep for a second straight night. He took a meal in the dining room. He listened to Les Préludes, the symphonic poem by Franz Liszt. He summoned Goebbels, who had just finished watching Gone With the Wind."

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"A lifelong Germanophile, Stalin appears to have been mesmerized by the might and daring of Germany’s parallel totalitarian regime. For a time, he recovered his personal and political equilibrium in his miraculous pact with Hitler, which deflected the German war machine, delivered a bounty of German industrial tools, enabled the conquest and Sovietization of tsarist borderlands, and reinserted the Soviet Union into the role of arbitrating world affairs. Hitler had whetted and, reluctantly, abetted Stalin’s own appetite. But far earlier than the despot imagined, his ability to extract profit from the immense danger Hitler posed to Europe and the world had run its course. This generated unbearable tension in Stalin’s life and rule, yet he stubbornly refused to come to grips with the new realities, and not solely out of greed for German technology. Despite his insight into the human psyche, demonic shrewdness, and sharp mind, Stalin was blinkered by ideology and fixed ideas."