375. Joseph Stalin’s Peterson Pipes
Pipe smoking and the problem of evil? It’s not something we normally think of together, especially at this time of year. Unless, of course, we might be observing Advent (a Christian penitential season before the Christmas festival beginning Dec. 25th) or Hannukah (a Jewish festival commemorating the recovery of Jerusalem and rededication of the Second Temple at the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt in the 2nd century BCE). If we're pipe smokers observing either season, of course, we might very well find our meditations turning to the tragedy and misery of the world. We might--if someone brings it up in a blog post--also wonder how Joseph Stalin could ever pick up (let alone smoke) a pipe without spontaneously combusting. That the Soviet dictator could own a Peterson pipe staggers the imagination. And yet he did. From an exhibition at the Historical Museum of Moscow in 2014 In “The Peace of St. Nicotine,” a chapter from The X Pipe, I set myself the task of exploring the relationship between pipe smoking and the pursuit of contemplative peace. In doing so, it was necessary to consider the reality of evil pipe smokers. I found no historical figure who so deeply desecrated the gentle art of smoking as Joseph Stalin: “At the starkest and almost unspeakable level are the crimes against humanity committed by Joseph Stalin during his dictatorship in Soviet Russia, who in public was nearly always photographed with a pipe. The Stalin Museum in his hometown of Gori has several of the pipes the dictator regularly smoked, while the Lenin Museum in Moscow contains over two dozen of his pipes, most given to him on his 70th birthday in 1948. His tastes in pipe tobacco were also wide-ranging, from the Russian oriental cigarettes Herzegovina Flor (he broke open two cigarettes for a bowl) to American classics like Edgeworth Sliced.” The online Lenin Museum currently has photos of twenty-five pipes that belonged to Stalin. Clicking on the hyperlink will show you the entire group. “Most of them,” the introduction states, “were presented to the head of the Soviet state for the 70th anniversary in 1949.” The descriptions suffer from often being placed below the wrong pipe and translated into English by someone who seems to speak neither Russian or English. Among the twenty-five pipes shown, two are most certainly Petes and two more might be. None of them has been smoked. [1] K&P Small P-Lip Billiard w/Oxidized Stem. Unsmoked. Catalog description: Smoking pipe. Form “Dublin” Ireland, Dublin. 1940s Briar (bird’s eye), ebony, polishing. Gift to I. V. Stalin for the 70th anniversary of his birth from London District Committee of the Communist Party of England. Museum’s collection contains two pipes of famous Irish firm “Peterson”. Pipes “Peterson” became world-famous thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle: the hero of his famous detectives Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe “Peterson”. The smoking pipe is made of a perennial briar with a pattern called “curls” or ” bird’s eye”. The mistakes in the description are so…