The Birthday Gifts of Josef Stalin, Bloodthirsty Communist Dictator!

There is a wonderful article over at the Moscow Times about the thousands of gifts given to Josef Stalin during his iron-fisted rule of the Soviet Union, which were dutifully preserved for the last sixty years by the Kremlin Museums and which are only now beginning to be thoroughly explored.

Some of them are diplomatic gifts, such as a sword presented to Stalin by Winston Churchill. Others are opportunist: there is a painting of Lenin made entirely with human hair, done by a strangely flamboyant hairdresser who wanted the Communist Party Central Committee to attach him to the hairdresser's salon in the Kremlin. And other gifts are bizarre little tokens of affection for a dictator who gleefully killed tens of millions of his own people...

In 1948, a Ukrainian man sent Josef Stalin a bottle of Yuzhny cologne for his 70th birthday, enclosing a badly spelled message of congratulations. The perfume was a cheap kind, sold in every department store, but it was the thought that counted.... Now dried up to a thick sediment, but still fragrant when opened, the perfume was carefully stored in the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg. It was sent to Stalin with a message full of spelling mistakes, written with a sort of ink pencil that had to be licked in order to keep writing... the giver must have thought that Stalin would like the perfume and "maybe he would dab some on.

It's like Karl Marx meets Guy de Maupassant, isn't it? Unfortunately, the article doesn't give us any clue who gave Stalin the magnificent hammer and sickly phone to the right. But what sort of capitalist swine wouldn't give his eyeteeth for one?

A Look Into The Vault [Moscow Times]