On this day, 60 years ago, Joseph Stalin died of a brain hemorrhage in his house near Moscow. Russia could finally breathe easy, having survived the reign of its own form of Caligula.
Stalin was actually born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, in 1878. "Stalin," a word that means "steel" or often translated, "man of steel," was an alias he adopted when writing pro-Communist articles before the 1917 revolution. Before this, he was a petty thief and an agitator. Exiled numerous times, his final sentence was conscription in the Imperial Army. However, he was rejected because of a deformed arm and a pair of webbed toes (the latter was considered the mark of the devil in Russian lore).
By the time Lenin arrived from his exile in Switzerland, Stalin had usurped control of Pravda. This position made him a good political candidate, and he was appointed as part of Lenin's five-man Politburo later that year. Each man was given command of a small army as the Russian Civil War escalated. Stalin's refusal to help Leon Trotsky's forces cost the Red Army two major battles in Poland. Stalin's conduct during the invasion of Georgia, his own homeland, established a permanent rift between him and Lenin that would never heal. Stalin's repressionist tactics clashed with Lenin's view that all Soviet states should be equal.
But Lenin died suddenly of a heart attack in 1924. Though he had condemned Stalin in his writings, Stalin himself had forged alliances with Lenin's confidants. His Testament, in which he appointed Trotsky as his successor and demanded Stalin's removal from power, was never read. Trotsky fled the country and would elude Stalin until 1940.
Stalin's policies in his early reign have become so infamous that they've been dubbed "Stalin-ism." Everything he did was to increase the power of himself and the state. His first move was to push for a more industrialized nation and central control of the economy. As Mao would do in the Great Leap Forward, Stalin failed to account for the grain shortfall. He blamed it on property-hoarding peasants called "kulaks," and ordered mass confiscations. Mostly centered in Ukraine, the famine that followed would kill tens of millions. Farmers in other parts of the Union were forced to live in large collectives.
It was around this time that Stalin's paranoia began to come out. Other members of the Party, even those who had helped him blindside Trotsky, were either imprisoned, exiled, or executed on a variety of phony charges. By 1930, Stalin had consolidated complete power to himself as the head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Stalin became suspicious of a popular party member named Sergei Kirov. When he suddenly turned up dead, Stalin placed the blame on an elaborate network of traitors and counter-revolutionaries. In response, Stalin ordered the Great Purge. The series of show trials, mass arrests, and executions would soon attack the Red Army. In the pre-war years, the military lost 40,000 of its own officers, including its highest-ranking and most competent generals. By the time Hitler's armies invaded in 1941, the Red Army was a mere shell of its former self, incapable of offering meaningful resistance.
For reasons that have never been fully explained, Stalin believed that he and Hitler would be life-long partners against the West. Despite the fact that Hitler had always denounced Communism publicly, the Molotov-Ribbentrof agreement in 1938 assured both parties that neither would attack the other. The world was stunned. When Poland capitulated a year later, the secret protocols gave Stalin half of the territory and a number of Baltic nations as a gift. The NKVD soon entered the new land, helping the SS round up Jews and other enemies.
Contrary to intelligence from the NKVD and Britain, Stalin did nothing to build his defenses for the German attack. The purges of the 30s had left such a scar on the Red Army that no one second-guessed him. When Hitler's Wehrmacht came on June 22, entire army groups of 300,000 or more surrendered without a fight. Stalin retired to his room and had a mental breakdown, unable to function for three days. When Molotov and two others came calling, Stalin was convinced that they had come to kill him. But he regained his composure and began giving orders for immediate counterattacks.
The 1930s purge became a permanent precedent in Red Army policy. Stalin was so afraid of generals who made too much positive press, that they often wound up dead or exiled. Only Molotov and Marshal Zhukov escaped completely unmolested. The foot soldier and the peasant also suffered. POWs were hastily shipped to the Gulags, labeled as "traitors." Civilians who had been captured by the Nazis were considered infected by fascism, harbingers of dangerous ideals. Soldiers who committed the slightest offenses were put into penal battalions, forced to walk over mine fields so the tanks wouldn't be destroyed. Those who were wounded sufficiently could be released because they were "atoned with his own blood." Thus, the Red Army continued to bolster and then devour itself.
Soviet atrocities during the war remained buried under a myriad of anti-German reports. But critics were out there, and in the final three months of the war, as these opinions came to Stalin's ears, he said, "The Soviet Army is not ideal, nor can it be. But the important thing is that is kills Germans, and kills them well!"
After the war, Stalin's cult of personality ensured that no one but him received any credit for defeating Hitler. Tensions between Russia, Britain and America were rising over the issue of the occupied Eastern European nations. As his health began to decline, Stalin forged a partnership with Mao Tse Tung, the new leader of Communist China. Mao asked Stalin's opinion on attacking South Korea across the 17? parallel. Stalin did not offer his support. Despite the fact that Russia now had the atomic bomb, their nuclear weapons weren't nearly as powerful or sophisticated as those in the United States.
His health problems led to more paranoia. In one of the last acts of his life, Stalin accused top Soviet doctors of trying to kill him and had dozens arrested. Ironically, they were mostly Jews. Evidence later revealed that Stalin was planning to wage a Hitler-esq campaign against the entire Jewish population, but his sudden death put a halt to it. On his death bed, Laventiy Beria, war-time head of the NKVD who had carried out hundreds of his death orders, began to berate and condemn him. When Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria fell to his knees and begged forgiveness.
Stalin's death left a power vacuum in Russia that wouldn't be resolved for years until Nikita Khrushchev gained control. In a speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, he gave a closed-doors speech entitled "On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences." In this speech, Khrushchev denounced Stalin as a monster for his purges of the army and terrible management of the war. The text was never circulated outside the highest echelons of the Communist government, hence, it was called the "secret speech." The West learned about it through CIA informers. The speech caused many in the audience to suffer heart attacks, while others committed suicide in their homes. Stalin's final victims had been from beyond the grave.
Khrushchev's actions led to a breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations, and began the Cold Thaw. Stalin's image was blotted from public squares and streets. His body was removed from public display at the Mausoleum of Lenin and quietly buried in a humble corner at the Necropolis.
A story from NPR today reveals that public opinion of Stalin is still heavily divided in Russia itself. Only 20% of people in Georgia think of him as a tyrannical monster. His omnipotent aura still haunts Eastern Europe to this day. His crimes would mar Communism with a stain that it could never escape. Perhaps that is why, more than anything, Trotsky called him, "The gravedigger of the Revolution."
In the 1992 HBO film "Stalin" Molotov and Khrushchev are having a private conversation about what to say to his legacy.
Molotov: "Before him we were a weak, backward country, Now look at us. We control half of Europe... the whole of China... We have the atomic bomb... We command respect. Without Stalin, it would have take twenty years longer."
Khrushchev: "I don't believe that! Without the killings, the purges, the arrests...without Stalin, we could have been a great nation!"
Molotov: "Our history required Stalin."
