1878-1953 - Stalin's Death
More than 1,000 people gathered on Red Square 05 March 2023 for the 70th anniversary of the death of Josef Stalin, whose ghost looms over the Ukraine conflict. Kyiv says the offensive is driven by Stalin-era imperialistic tendencies, while the heightened repression of critics inside Russia is reminiscent of Soviet methods.
Two Stalins are fighting among themselves: on the Russian side, this is the winner, the builder of a powerful just power and a new world order, and on the western side, the tyrant of his own people and the oppressor of the peoples of Europe. The Georgian Bolshevik has been portrayed as a mass murderer, a vital friend, and a dangerous tyrant, depending on the mood of the day. In the West, the condemnation of Stalin’s policies is now absolute, but that has not always been the case. Stalin, with the disappearance of communist parties as propaganda tools and the fall of the Soviet Union, has simply become another bogeyman. The Georgian remains a problematic political figure in Russia, and many other former Soviet states, and his legacy is frequently at the center of fierce debates.
The wave of political repression from 1936-1938, also known as the Great Terror, is one of the most significant elements of Stalin’s legacy. In the West, this period is usually seen through the prism of British historian Robert Conquest, who has been accused by others – such as American historian J. Arch Getty – of constant extrapolation of casualty figures and of omitting the beginning of the purges under Lenin. These figures are constantly reviewed by historians, but the West has focused more on this period than on anything else. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Stalin’s policies were extremely harsh. He has also been held responsible for causing forced famines in Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan, which killed millions of people.
The country had never been an industrial power and understanding that an important war was coming, Stalin famously explained the situation in a speech to industrial managers in 1931: “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.” The industrialization of the Soviet Union led to disastrous casualties among the population, however it did modernize the country. As Isaac Deutscher said, (though the quote is frequently attributed to Winston Churchill) “The core of Stalin's genuine historic achievement lies in the fact that he found Russia working with the wooden plough and left her equipped with atomic piles.”
Stalin had become a problem for liberal democratic propaganda during the war. Just as Soviet agitprop had to justify its sudden alliance with capitalist countries, the Anglo-Saxon media had to explain why Stalin was a great statesman and a good ally. Pro-Soviet movies were produced, on the personal request of the American president, and the feature film “Mission to Moscow” was created in order to justify the purges. Stalin was twice named Time magazine’s “Person of the year” within three years.
The way in which Stalin conducted the war against Nazi Germany would also be a source of criticism, after the war’s conclusion. The leader had ruthlessly sent millions of soldiers to their deaths following his “not a step back!” proclamation in order to break Hitler’s war machine. His approach inflicted the greatest amount of damage on the Axis armies but at a tremendous cost. Such a sacrifice of life was anathema to Western leaders seeking reelection even during wartime. According to many historians, including Gil Meron, this was a major factor in the Allies continual postponement of opening a second front in Europe and one that enraged Stalin, as evidenced by his correspondence with Churchill. Essentially, the sacrifice made by the Soviets was both welcome and appalling from the Western point-of-view.
An Ifop poll conducted at the end of World War II showed the majority of the French population believed that the Soviet Union had won the war, not Western powers. Stalin’s popularity was at its peak and he was arguably the most powerful man in the world.
Russia already renounced Stalin twice, with devastating consequences. He was disowned for the first time three years after his death, when Khrushchev began a public fight against the cult of personality and its consequences. The condemnation of the repressions - which cost millions of lives not only of the "red nomenclature", but also of ordinary citizens, including the remnants of the "exploiting classes" - was the right step. But some claimed the condemnation and debunking of yesterday's leader took on the character of the massacre of mice over a dead lion - the scales of Khrushchev and Stalin were too incomparable, and in all this one felt some kind of revenge for past humiliations.
Beijing did not understand why the "elder brother" was so defiantly trampling on the actual creator of both his state and the entire world communist system. Ideological disputes eventually led to rupture and conflict with enormous geopolitical consequences. If the USSR in the 1950s had found a formula in relation to Stalin, later applied by the Chinese to Mao - he was 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong - history (and not only Soviet and Sino-Soviet relations, but also world history) could go in a completely different way.
And in perestroika, the suddenly allowed Stalin turned into a battering ram against the CPSU and the USSR - the exposure of his real and fictional atrocities not only overshadowed all his merits, but also made him a "second Hitler." The contribution of the anti-Stalinist campaign to the collapse of the Union is difficult to overestimate.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a completely reverse process began - the process of Stalin's rehabilitation from below. Now Stalin has become not only the winner in the great war, but also a thunderstorm of internal enemies, a scourge for corrupt officials and traitors, a punishing sword for rotten elites, a builder of a just system. It is this image of Stalin that has finally become entrenched in the public mind - and that is why almost all polls now put him in first place in popularity among all the historical figures of our history.
Putin is seeking to rehabilitate the dictator as the leader who fought off the Nazis and turned the Soviet Union into a major world power. The Great Patriotic War victory is the last unifying denominator, the last trump card of Russian propaganda. Amid losses in the war in Ukraine, it becomes all the more important for Moscow to promote the idea that, like Stalin in 1945, Putin is the one who will lead the country to victory. What is new is that the Second World War is no longer described as being won by the Allies, the Red Army or even by the "heroic Soviet people" — a label coined by Khrushchev in his anti-Stalinism speech in 1956 — but rather by Stalin himself.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
