Saddam & Stalin

Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” (and of a New Statesman article on anti-semitism last week), compares Saddam and Stalin in the NYT (via Milt’s File):

Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them czarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules. At one point, I asked an old caretaker if any other Westerners had visited them. “No,” she replied, “but there was an Arab gentleman in 1970’s who insisted on visiting every one!” His name? “Saddam Hussein.”