Breaking Stalin

Breaking Stalin

Chapter XXV

XXV
Wow, if historians knew my fraudulent work, they’d put me away!  Truth is, there’s probably a .09% chance(kind of made that up) the young Hitler ever talked to the young Stalin and Bukharin.  But it would be the ultimate irony.  And I just couldn’t pass up such a chapter because the truth is the year of 1913 is a strange one for Vienna.  Bukharin, Stalin, and Hitler were all there at the beginning of the year.  Stalin left back to Saint Petersburg in February.  Hitler then left for Vienna for good in May, and Lenin paid Bukharin a visit in June.  I guess I just find it strange that some of the future’s most polemic and powerful world leaders would all be in the same city at the same time, so I had to bring it up.

But the truth is an evasive thing.  Hitler was painting in the era of open-air painting, so I mean, who knows?  Maybe one quiet day Bukharin or Stalin walked past a young painter with a small mustache in the streets of Vienna.  I can see them stopping for a moment to admire his amateur work and then continuing on silently, maybe smiling at him, or offering him some word of congratulation.  But for one moment in time, I see the youth, unpressured by the movements of the world and united by the very fact that they were young dreamers, caught up in the city of artists and writers on the eve of the war that would change it all.  And make their dreams a horrid reality.

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