his willingness last month to hold a meeting with Stalin in certain circumstances, and Mr Churchill subsequently told the House of Commons that he did not rule out the possibility of three-cornered discussions.
Stalin’s New Role: Economic Theorist
It was in the last year of his life that Stalin appeared in a role which would have surprised former colleagues, such as Lenin and Trotsky, but which therefore may well have given him most pride – as an economic theorist in the tradition of (and not less important than) Marx, Engels and Lenin. Shortly before the nineteenth congress of the Russian Communist Party, which was held in Moscow in October, 1952 – the first congress since 1939 – Stalin published his Economic Problems of Socialism in the ussr, which has since become the definitive text-book for Communists in all countries. In this work he warned his readers that, for all Russia’s successes in building a new society, it was wrong to think that the natural economic laws did not apply as much in Russia as elsewhere. He also forecast a deepening crisis of capitalism, that west European countries would dissociate themselves from the United States, and that war between these capitalist countries was inevitable. He also outlined a programme of basic preliminary conditions necessary for the transition to Communism in the Soviet Union. At the Congress there was a reorganization of party organs – the Politburo and the Orgburo being brought together in a single body, the Praesidium of the Central Committee, of which Stalin became chairman.
On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in December, 1949, there were widespread celebrations throughout the Soviet Union and busts of Stalin were erected on 38 of the highest peaks in the Soviet Union. It marked, too, the inauguration of international Stalin peace prizes, to be awarded each year on his birthday. On March 3, 1953, it was announced by Moscow radio that Stalin was gravely ill as the result of a haemorrhage, that he had lost consciousness and speech, and that he would take no part in leading activity for a prolonged period.
Only a few details are known of Stalin’s personal life. In 1903 he married Yekaterina Svanidze, a profoundly religious woman and the sister of a Georgian comrade, who left him a son, Yasha, when she died in 1907 of pneumonia. His second wife, whom he married in 1918 – Nadezhda Alliluyeva – was 20 years younger than himself and was the daughter of a Bolshevik worker, with whom Stalin had contacts in both the Caucasus and St Petersburg. She was formerly one of Lenin’s secretaries and later studied at a technical college in Moscow. This marriage, too, ended with the death of his wife, in November, 1932. She left him two children – a daughter, Svetlana, and a son, Vassili, now a high ranking officer in the Soviet Air Force. Late in life he married Rosa Kaganovich, the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, a member of the Politburo.
Alan Turing
7 June 1954
Dr Alan Mathison Turing, obe, frs, whose death at the age of 41 has already been reported, was born on June 23, 1912, the son of Julius Mathison Turing. He was educated at Sherborne School and at King’s College, Cambridge, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1935. He was appointed obe in 1941 for wartime services in the Foreign Office and was elected frs in 1951. Until 1939 he was a pure mathematician and logician, but after the war most of his work was connected with the design and use of automatic computing machines, first at the National Physical Laboratory and then since 1948 at Manchester University, where he was a Reader at the time of his death.
The discovery which will give Turing a permanent place in mathematical logic was made not long after he had graduated. This was his proof that (contrary to the then prevailing view of Hilbert and his school at Göttingen) there are classes of mathematical problem which cannot be solved by any fixed and definite process. The crucial step in his proof was to clarify the notion of a ‘definite process’, which he interpreted as ‘something that could be done by an automatic machine’. Although other proofs of insolubility were published at about the same time by other authors, the ‘Turing machine’ has remained the most vivid, and in many ways the most convincing, interpretation of these essentially equivalent theories. The description that he then gave of a ‘universal’ computing machine was entirely theoretical in purpose, but Turing’s strong interest in all kinds of practical experiment made him even then interested in the possibility of actually constructing a machine on these lines.
It was natural at the end of the war for him to accept an invitation to work at the National Physical Laboratory on the development of the ace, the first large computer to be begun in this country. He threw himself into the work with enthusiasm, thoroughly enjoying the rapid alternation of abstract questions of design with problems of practical engineering. Later at Manchester he devoted himself more particularly to problems arising out of the use of the machine. It was at this time that he became involved in discussions on the contrasts and similarities between machines and brains. Turing’s view, expressed with great force and wit, was that it was for those who saw an unbridgeable gap between the two to say just where the difference lay.
The war interrupted Turing’s mathematical career for the six critical years between the age of 27 and 33. A mathematical theory of the chemical basis of organic growth which he had lately started to develop has been tragically interrupted, and must remain a fragment. Important though his contributions to logic have been, few who have known him personally can doubt that, with his deep insight into the principles of mathematics and of natural science, and his brilliant originality, he would, but for these accidents, have made much greater discoveries.
Henri Matisse
A master of modern French painting
3 November 1954
M. Henri Matisse, one of the most outstanding representatives of the modern French school of painting, died on Wednesday at his home at Nice. He was 84, and had been in poor health for several years.
Partly, if not chiefly, because they were both subject to the same indiscriminate abuse from artistic ‘diehards’ in England, M. Henri Matisse and Señor Pablo Picasso were closely connected in the public mind. In reality they had not very much in common, though they were associated in their first departure from academic art. To some extent they were complementary, and Matisse was weak where Picasso is strong, and the other way about. Of the two Matisse was the less intellectual, and he had not the range and depth or the inventiveness and versatility of the Spaniard but it is questionable if he had not more of the special sensibility of the painter as distinct from other kinds of creative artist. His colour was enchanting and his handling of paint was masterly.
Henri Matisse, who is said to have had some Jewish blood, was a Norman, the son of a grain merchant in a small way, and was born at Le Cateau Nord, on December 31, 1869. His father wanted him to become a lawyer and put him into the office of a legal friend to pick up what knowledge he could before entering a law school. But after about a year the boy got appendicitis, and during his long convalescence at home he took up painting at the suggestion of a neighbour who had seen him sketching. The result was that when he was 20 Matisse went to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts and studied under Bouguereau. When he was 24 he married Mlle Amelie Noellie Parayre, and before long he had a young family of a daughter and two sons. Times were hard, but besides being an excellent housewife Mme Matisse opened a small millinery shop to help out the family income.
Then Gustave Moreau, the ‘mystical’ painter, who may be said to have started the cult of ‘Salome’, saw Matisse working in the Louvre, making copies of pictures there, and invited him to study in his own studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was destined to become a nursery of young rebels, the fellow pupils of Matisse including Rouault and Dufy. In 1897 Matisse met the veteran Camille Pissarro and for a time worked as successfully as an Impressionist as he had as a copyist of old masters in the Louvre. On the advice of Pissarro in 1898 Matisse visited London to study Turner. Matisse was not greatly impressed by Turner, which was not surprising, because the acute interest in Paris had shifted from Impressionism, but he heard about Whistler and his Japanese prints. On his return to Paris he began to study oriental art systematically, and after a visit to Corsica, where he stayed a year, he went to Munich to see an exhibition of Moslem art, which confirmed his impression of the decorative values of the East.
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