It has been presented throughout history that tyrannical leaders rely upon methods of control and stability to maintain an absolutist rule. Having a sense of control was particularly vital to Joseph Stalin, a man driven by paranoia and fear of defeat. Usually, control would be associated with terror, something quite well-known to Stalin as a leader. However, Stalin found a more personal interest in the documentation aspect of control.

As a meticulous perfectionist, it was clear that Stalin would not settle for a Russian history which didn’t suit his means. The same applied to his attitude towards the current state of Soviet Russia.

Stalin would sit at his desk, scrawling indecipherable notes across pages and pages of documents, ensuring whatever words were said within them benefitted his regime. The piece of equipment he used: a blue crayon. In literature by George Orwell such as 1984 and Animal Farm, and also highlighted within multiple of Stalin’s biographies, the extent of Stalin’s desire to ‘re-write history’ is evident, examples like Newspeak and the seven commandments displaying this to us.

I think the use of this crayon is symbolic of the man himself, the ‘Man of Steel’ as his false name suggests. He was almost an invisible man, and yet the very sight of his blue scrawl was enough to terrify a population. His editorial obsessions displayed by this activity create a sense of desperation, something Stalin was known to feel regularly due to his paranoid personality and dogmatic view towards right and wrong.