He was certainly more than a gangster but he seems to have been a horrible person. He lived an acetic lifestyle and pushed that disdain of pleasure into the par

He was certainly more than a gangster but he seems to have been a horrible person. He lived an acetic lifestyle and pushed that disdain of pleasure into the party orthodoxy. He used his allies for advantage in a way that went way beyond the political norm of the time. And he laid the groundwork for the Soviet Gulag system. An apparatus that inflicted the equivalent of half a dozen holocaust's worth of human suffering over its existence.