Regarding the pic with Czar Nicholas: could you imagine Stalin posing like that?
The czars for all their faults were a hundred times more human than the communists.
I remember reading somewhere about how relatively few of the czars’ political enemies actually wound up in prison, and how mild the czarist prisons were, with light security and visits from relatives and that sort of thing. The 1917 revolution is a classic case of the cure being a hundred times worse than the disease.
Indeed.
Stalin was a big practical joker......he would even tell the rest of the Politburo when they had dinner together that he poisoned their food, just to see their reaction.