Tag Archives: History

I’ve been thinking recently of public displays of grief after a leader has died. Some weeks ago, the ex-President of Uruguay Jose Mujica died, and I was struck by the spontaneous and heartfelt applause that accompanied the journey of his casket from the presidential palace to the National Assembly.

In contrast, I remembered the extravagant hysteria after the death of Kim Jong-il some thirteen years ago.

I’ve been thinking about the deaths of leaders while reading Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin. Fitzpatrick is an eminent Australian historian of Soviet history, but this small book is written for a general audience.

The title echoes the Armando Iannucci movie of the same name, which Fitzpatrick admires:

In his The Death of Stalin, the British film director Armando Iannucci memorably depicted the death scene as black comedy, with Stalin’s potential successors united only by ambition and relief, milling around distractedly at his deathbed. That is indeed how the main eye-witness accounts describe it, although to be sure these were eye-witnesses with their own agendas. There is black comedy in this [i.e. Fitzpatrick’s] book too, not just in connection with Stalin’s death but also with the fate of his corporeal remains (buried, dug up, reburied) and the subsequent persistent apparitions of his ghost. But not everything about Stalin’s death is comic. It had serious implications for his country and the world in the twentieth century and beyond; this book sets out to unravel them. (p.2)

Chapter 1 starts with a biographical sketch of Stalin. Under the chapter title is a police photograph of Stalin taken in the early 1900s, showing a quite handsome, chiselled young man – quite unlike the pudgy, square man he became in later life. He was involved in the Russian revolution from the start, in fact he made it back to Petrograd before Lenin did after the February Revolution of 1917. Although a member of the Politburo since its inception in August 1917, he became the quintessential backroom man, a role formalized with his appointment as general secretary of the party in April 1922. Despite Lenin adding a postscript to a document that came to be known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, warning that Stalin’s rudeness rendered him unsuitable as party secretary, Stalin and the Central Committee saw off an opposing faction and he became leader after Lenin’s death. His ascendancy was welcomed by Western observers, who saw him as a centrist. He mounted a program of mass collectivization and industrialization guided by a Five Year Plan. By 1934 he announced a new phase of relaxation, and he introduced the new Soviet Constitution. But he changed direction again at the end of 1934 when his friend Sergei Kirov was assassinated by what turned out to be a lone-wolf actor. Mass terror was released, directed initially against members of the party itself, then to the broader population. He startled the Soviet public and the West by signing a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, which was broken in June 1941 when Germany launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite the huge cost in infrastructure, military and population loss, Stalin emerged from WW2 with enormously enhanced prestige at home and internationally. Within a few years, unfounded fears of Soviet communism (unfounded because Stalin knew that Russia was in no state to launch WW3) settled into the Cold War, fueled by mutual hostility and suspicion, but tempered by the nuclear threat and the use of proxies. By 1949 the cult of Stalin reached a peak as Stalin’s 70th birthday was celebrated.

By early 1953, Stalin would be dead. In Chapter 2 ‘Stalin’s Death’ we see Stalin as a lonely, isolated, paranoiac man who insisted on the attendance of his Politburo colleagues at film nights at the Kremlin, and crude, men-only dinners at his dacha. The day to day running of the business of government was carried out by the Politburo, with sudden interventions by Stalin, and shifts against his erstwhile colleagues. One of these initiatives was the arrest of a number of physicians from the Kremlin hospital, known as the ‘Doctors Plot’. As we know from the film ‘The Death of Stalin’, this backfired somewhat when there was no one to treat him in the dacha when he had what appeared to be a stroke. Actually, Iannucci didn’t have to embellish much in his depiction of Stalin’s death: the fear of finding him dead; him not actually being dead; sending in the housekeeper; having to find a doctor because they had all been arrested; the arrival of his daughter and drunk son. However, unlike in the film, they quickly set up an efficient government, calling themselves ‘the collective leadership’ (p. 37)- a fact that might have undermined Iannucci’s black comedy somewhat. His body lay in state in the Hall of Columns in Moscow for three days and was buried in the Mausoleum, with his name emblazoned under that of Lenin.

Chapter Three examines reactions at home, noting the recorded responses of writers and members of the public, before then moving on to the immediate, radical policy changes that were set in train. First was the announcement of a mass amnesty for non-political prisoners in the Gulag, then the withdrawal of charges against the doctors. There was a change in direction on the nationalities policy and an abrupt halt to the Stalin cult. The first six months of 1953 was described as a ‘cultural thaw’, but this was not necessarily welcomed by the Soviet public. Beria was ousted and put on trial and swiftly executed. This made it possible to put all the blame for the Stalinist terror onto Beria’s shoulders.

Reactions Abroad are dealt with in Chapter 4. The rest of the world wasn’t really sure what would happen when Stalin died. Western intelligence was at a low ebb between the end of the war and Stalin’s death, and so the West missed the signals that the ‘collective leadership’ might be willing to deal. Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles, one of the most virulent anti-Communists on the US political scene (p. 65). He and his brother Allen, who headed the CIA, favoured undermining the Soviet Union by making trouble in the satellite-states, rather than provoking a head-on confrontation. It was, as A.J.P. Taylor said, a turning point that failed to turn (p. 71). It was only in 1956, with Krushchev’s partial denunciation of Stalin that there was Western recognition of the thaw.

The closing Chapter 5 ‘Stalin’s Ghost’ looks at his legacy. For the first years after Stalin’s death the terror of the 1930s was the great unmentionable. This was broken in 1956 with Krushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ to the Congress in Moscow which denounced Stalin, the cult of personality and the Purges and terror under his government. Although writers embraced openness about Stalin’s reign, the reactions of ordinary people varied. Some simply did not believe it, and there was public protest in Georgia, where the speech was seen as an insult. In some of the Soviet satellites, the Soviet Thaw encouraged local Communist parties, including in Hungary, to remove unpopular Stalinist leaders and put in Communists with a reform agenda. The Soviet Thaw didn’t extend that far: Soviet tanks were sent in to Hungary, and reformer leaders were arrested. Krushchev was ousted in 1964, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and replaced by Brezhnev who oversaw a replay of Hungary 1956 in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even though a breach opened up between Brezhnev and the intelligentsia, Stalin was not rehabilitated. That had to wait for Vladimir Putin. The book ends on a rather chilling note.

There is a lot in this small book, which is presented so clearly that it can engage readers who are not particularly familiar with Russian history. The book provides a timeline spanning 1879 to 2000, and a full ten-page ‘cast of characters’ including not only Russian political and cultural personalities, but also Mao Tse Tung (Zedong), Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. The book has endnotes, but they are not footnoted throughout the text.It is liberally illustrated, albeit in black and white (although that echoes the theme of the book quite well), and by bringing it right up to the present day and referencing the Iannucci film it has a contemporary edge. It’s a good read.

My rating: 8.5 out of ten

Sourced from: review copy from Black Inc.