Does Joseph Stalin’s Death Mark the End of Soviet Totalitarianism?

Born in Gori, Georgia on December 18, 1878 – officially December 21, 1879 – Stalin was 74 years old in March 1953. Since October 10, 1917, he has been a member of the Politburo, which he created with Trotsky. Both then share the leadership with Lenin, Kamenev and Krestinsky – the latter two, like Trotsky, will be assassinated later on his orders. At the time of the October Revolution which marked the birth of the Bolshevik regime, he only played a minor role, but he had the tactical intelligence to always line up behind the positions of Lenin, the undisputed leader of the Party who had since become November 1917 Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars.

So Stalin became five years later, at the end of the Civil War which accompanied the arrival of the new regime, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a position he held until its abolition in 1952. Bureaucrat Discreet, he clashed with Leon Trotsky, the cold organizer of the Red Army, but relied on the political police, the Tcheka – which became the GPU in 1922 – and bonded with its leader, Felix Djerzinski. Very weakened, Lenin no longer sees in him the simple zealous executor “with a firm hand” whose merits he had praised until then, but he lacked the strength to slow down his ascent. When the President of the Council of People’s Commissars died in January 1924, Stalin already had his hands on most of the levers of power.

Twenty-nine years of absolute power

Having, against his will, embalmed his predecessor, then made his will pass for a forgery (Lenin described it in particular as “too brutal”), Stalin pursued the new economic policy (the NEP, which maintained a share of individual initiatives in economy) until the end of the seven-year plan in 1928 and marginalized the left wing of the party. At the turn of the 1930s, he planned collectivization and this time set aside his right wing. The totalitarian drift reaches new heights with the famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933the so-called Moscow trials in 1936-1938 and then the Second World War.

In 1953, Stalin eliminated many of his October Revolution comrades. The survivors are zealous bureaucrats, like Viatcheslav Molotov, sometimes doubled by cold-blooded opportunists like Lavrenti Beria. Even the latter knows he is on borrowed time during the last months of life of the “Little Father of the Peoples”, who in 1951 appointed Semion Ignatiev as head of State Security, with among other intentions to prepare the fall of his former protege. . Lavrenti Beria knows all the better what awaits him as he himself had Nicolaï Yezhov executed in 1940, his former leader in the NKVD – new name for the political police – whom Stalin had made solely responsible for the “great purges” who literally bled the party and the Red Army cadres.

On February 28, 1953, Stalin assembled the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet in the Kremlin around his new paranoid fixation, the supposed “white coat conspiracy”, of doctors accused in January of having killed two Soviet leaders and preparing for other assassinations. Almost all of them are Jews and this plot of the NKVD is part of the anti-Semitic policy of the USSR which became obsessive after the creation of the State of Israel in 1947, especially since the new country was officially supported by the United States. Among the hundreds of accused are Stalin’s doctor and the chief medical officer of the Soviet Army. In August 1952, Beria had thirteen antifascist Jewish intellectuals shot. This moment will go down in history as the “Night of the Murdered Poets”.^I

A solitary agony, under the sign of paranoia

On the evening of February 28, 1953, therefore, around 11 p.m., Stalin got into one of the three limousines which took him to his dacha – the other two being supposed to cover the tracks in the event of an attack. He dined there with Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchev. He appears to be in excellent humor. He then goes to bed in one of his seven bedrooms, each closed by an armored door. The next day, he gives no sign of life that day, does not order his meals – he has them tasted to avoid any attempt at poisoning. He is eventually found unconscious in his room, stricken with a stroke, presumably shortly after leaving his hosts.

Warned, Malenkov informs Beria who alone can authorize the arrival of a doctor. During the night of March 1 to 2, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Beria and Malenkov, at the bedside of the dying man, waited for several hours, before deciding to call a doctor. It is already too late. Stalin was declared dead on March 5 at 6 a.m. These few days – which gave rise to different hypotheses, from the deliberate abandonment of care to a deliberate assassination fomented by Beria – inspired the fiction of Armando Iannucci, The Death of Stalinin 2017, which for taking many liberties with historical accuracy, nevertheless restores the atmosphere of tragic farce and poetic justice around a death precipitated by isolation and terror that the tyrant had dutifully created.

The funeral takes place from March 6 to 9 in an atmosphere of real deference to constraint, rendered in a skilful archival montage by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa with his 2019 film, State funeral. In Moscow, five million people marched willy-nilly in front of the remains and the jostling left 1,500 dead. The competent personnel having been eliminated, Stalin’s body is less embalmed than that of Lenin. In France, the communist cultural review French letters adorned with a drawing by Picasso representing a young Stalin. A veritable scandal ensued, known as “The Portrait Affair”, during which Aragon criticized the painter for his lack of realism in the representation.

Reviled under Khrushchev, the reference to Stalin survived communism

Stalin’s coffin is placed alongside that of Lenin in Red Square. But the totalitarian vice is largely loosened by Lavrenti Beria, who was for a long time its armed wing. He became for a few months the new strong man of the regime. One million prisoners Gulag are immediately granted amnesty, the accused of the “white coat plot” are released. Beria is in favor of a reconciliation with Yugoslavia and considers a possible reunification of Germany, against the guarantee of its demilitarization. Revolts break out in the Gulag, in Romania and in Berlin. Beria is arrested in June. He was officially executed in December, but according to his son, he was shot the same day he was arrested. After him, no member of the Politburo will be sentenced to death. This is one of the strong signs of de-Stalinization.

The one who became the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, reveals behind closed doors to the delegates of the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 his “report on the cult of personality” . If the content leaked immediately to the West, it would not be published until the end of the 1980s, at the time of Glasnost and Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1961, Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum in Red Square and buried discreetly. The city of Stalingrad is renamed Volgograd. The proportion of political prisoners in the Gulag – renamed in 1958 “rehabilitation through labor colony” – decreased drastically. Leonid Brezhnev, who dismisses Nikita Khrushchev from power in 1964, nevertheless revives laudatory references to Stalin and a certain political orthodoxy. With him, the concentration camp universe regained vigor, but remained far from the mass deportations of the interwar period.

Today, underlines Sacha Koulaeva, defender of human rights, member of the Memorial NGO and teacher at Sciences Po, the reference to Stalin is fully assumed. ” At the beginningshe remembers, Vladimir Putin was seen as the simple successor of Boris Yeltsin. But the first thing I learned about him was that he toasted Stalin on December 21 at a reception with senior officials.. For this daughter and granddaughter of a dissident who now lives in Paris and admits not going past the metro station Stalingrad without feeling a deep unease, the shock was immense. ” From, monuments appearedshe continues. We now speak of Stalin’s military genius. The reference to the martial law of June 22, 1941 was invoked in the Donbass as early as 2014. The continuity is obvious. It’s not ideological, but Putin uses everything that helps the national structure to maintain itself. »

To evoke March 5, 1953, the memories of Sacha Koulaeva jostle: that of a friend of his father, the scientist Yuri Gastev, who having learned shortly before his death that Stalin suffered from Cheyne-Stokes respiration – which meant in his case that he had gone into agony – went to get alcohol in the middle of the night and humorously dedicated a note from his thesis to the two Irish researchers who had thus described the symptoms of sleep apnea; that of the Gulag where the prisoners not having the right to speak, threw their hats towards the sky at the announcement of the end of the tyrant; that of his mother, born on March 4, who now celebrated her birthday a day late, for the joy of toasting Stalin’s death with her friends. ” My parents are gone, but March 5she smiles, I always raise my glass when passing by them. »

I On the history of Soviet anti-Semitism, you have to see the film written by Guillaume Ribot and Antoine Germa, Life and destiny of Liblack glass, the destruction of the ussr jews (2019).