Miss America, 1924
who began her route to victory
as Philadelphia, doesn’t fit the stereotype
of a girl competing in a beauty pageant
but there’s still enough about her
to distract us from the emergence
of Joseph Stalin, a largely unknown
bureaucrat, as the frontrunner
for the Soviet leadership after the death
of Lenin, none of us could have guessed
how he would distort and devalue
the revolution and impose himself
grotesquely at the apex of the Union
.
Steven Taylor
.