This weekend’s Financial Times features a number of articles to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s death (the old tyrant died on March, 5th 1953). There’s a lot that’s worth reading, but the highlights include an interview with Robert Conquest, the greatest western historian of Soviet terror. Amongst the stories he tells is the response of French communists when Stalin lowered the age for the death penalty for children to 12:
“It was acceptable, they claimed, “because in Russia, they said, people mature so much quicker.””