Dictator's crude scrawls laid bare for all to see

The pictures are almost all reproductions of male nudes sketched by 19th-century Russian painters; the crude and ominous captions scrawled beneath them in red or blue pencil are unmistakably in the hand of Joseph Stalin.

The set of 19 pictures, never before seen in public, went on display at a Moscow gallery on Saturday, for the 130th anniversary of Stalin's birth tomorrow.

Stalin annotated the pictures with remarks, varying from laddish humour to thoughtful aphorisms. In one picture, he has scribbled out the genital area with red pencil; in another he has drawn a large blue cross across the man's torso, but in most of the portraits, he restricts himself to captions in the bottom corner, some signed. Next to one picture of a pensive nude, Stalin has written, "One thinking fool is worse than 10 enemies".

Others have messages for Bolshevik comrades, both dead and alive: "Radek, you ginger bastard, if you hadn't pissed into the wind, if you hadn't been so bad, you'd still be alive," reads one caption, placed alongside a muscular male nude drawn from the back by Vasily Surikov.

Karl Radek was a leading activist who helped draft Stalin's constitution of 1936. He fell out of favour the following year, and was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour. Historians believe he was executed in 1939 on Stalin's orders.

Viktor Turshchatov, a Russian journalist who helped organise the exhibition said: "You get a real sense of how solitary and isolated he felt."

Handwriting specialists have confirmed the writing is Stalin's. The exhibition organisers said the images had been held by a family who assumed a relative had worked in Stalin's security team.

- INDEPENDENT