Sometimes, One Death Is Not A Tragedy

Tim Cavanaugh | March 8, 2005

Since Big Joe Stalin seems to be coming back into vogue, I'm reminded of a what-if exercise Nick Gillespie and I did a while back: What if all the Soviet villains had died in dramatically appropriate ways? Lavrenti Beria is closely inspecting the ice sculpture at some state dinner when the sculptor slips and accidentally drives his ice pick into the NKVD chief's head. On a walking tour of a Ukraine footwear factory, Nikita Kruschev is killed as a rogue shoe pops out of the machinery and bonks him on the head. As the Heinkels bomb Moscow, Stalin sits calmly in his bomb shelter, but a shock wave tips over a bookcase full of heavy volumes of statistics, crushing the the Secretary General. And so on. Suggestions welcome.