History

March 5, 1953: Does the death of Joseph Stalin mark the end of Soviet totalitarianism?

Monument to Stalin in Prague, in Letná Park, inaugurated in 1955 and destroyed in November 1962. It was then the largest group of statues in Europe, colloquially nicknamed by the Czechs "the queue at the butchery".

© Miroslav Vopata, taken by my grandfather, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Text by: Olivier Favier Follow

9 mins

On March 5, 1953, Iossif Vissarionovitch Djougachvili, known throughout the world by his pseudonym Stalin, derived from the Russian 

"steel", officially died at 6 a.m. in his dacha in Kountsevo, west of Moscow.

The news is not published until the next day at 4 am.

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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 peaked

, the 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 NKVD machination is part of the anti-Semitic policy of the USSR which became obsessive after

in 1947, especially since the new country is 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,

, in 2017, which to take many liberties with historical accuracy, nevertheless restores the atmosphere of tragic farce and poetic justice around a death precipitated by the

The funeral takes place March 6-9 in an atmosphere of genuine deference to duress, rendered in a scholarly archival montage by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa with his 2019 film, State

.

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

is 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.

Prisoners

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 leaks immediately to the West, it will not be published until the end of the 1980s, at the time of Glasnost and 

.

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,

and teacher at Sciences Po, the reference to Stalin is fully assumed.

“ 

, she recalls,

.

For this daughter and granddaughter of a dissident who now lives in Paris and admits not passing in front of the

metro station without feeling deep discomfort, the shock was immense.

“ 

, she continues.

 »

To evoke March 5, 1953, the family 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 – this which in his case meant 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 to the sky at the announcement of the end of the tyrant, a story that haunted his imagination throughout his childhood;

that of his grandmother, born on March 4, who now celebrated her birthday a day late, for the joy of toasting Stalin's death with her friends.

" 

, she smiles,

 »

Khrtuchev's revelations in 1956 embarrassed the Prague government a year after the erection of the monument to Stalin.

In 1962, the order was given by the government to make it disappear: “Destroy it without too much noise.

Its destruction should be quick and seen by as few people as possible.

© Jon's pics, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

i On the history of Soviet anti-Semitism, you have to see the film written by Guillaume Ribot and Antoine Germa,

, the Destruction of the Jews of the Urss (2019).

Our selection on the subject:

► To listen

• Stalin is dead

• Death of Stalin, death of the gulag?

• Fall of the USSR: in Russia, the teaching of history is still far from being objective

► To read

• In front of Stalin's tomb, the homage of those nostalgic for the USSR.

• Tribute or criticism, a documentary divides in Russia.

• The death of Stalin on the site of Lumni.

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