Before he was leader of the old USSR Stalin was known as a poet. And a good one. “Stalin was no Georgian Pushkin. The poems’ romantic imagery is derivative, but their beauty lies in the rhythm and language… Stalin never publicly acknowledged his own poems. Why did he stop writing them? One answer is that, gifted as he was at poetry, he was superbly qualified for revolutionary politics in every way: Marxism was to be his religion and his poetry.”