On this date in history: MARCH 5,1953, the Soviet Union announced that Joseph Stalin had died at age 73. Stalin had been in a coma after having a stroke four days earlier. 

WHO KILLED STALIN

File Photo by Library of Congress/UPI

SEE STALIN

New Study Supports Idea Stalin Was Poisoned

By Michael Wines
March 5, 2003

Fifty years after Stalin died, felled by a brain hemorrhage at his dacha, an exhaustive study of long-secret Soviet records lends new weight to an old theory that he was actually poisoned, perhaps to avert a looming war with the United States.

That war may well have been closer than anyone outside the Kremlin suspected at the time, say the authors of a new book based on the records.

The 402-page book, ''Stalin's Last Crime,'' will be published later this month. Relying on a previously secret account by doctors of Stalin's final days, its authors suggest that he may have been poisoned with warfarin, a tasteless and colorless blood thinner also used as a rat killer, during a final dinner with four members of his Politburo.

They base that theory in part on early drafts of the report, which show that Stalin suffered extensive stomach hemorrhaging during his death throes. The authors state that significant references to stomach bleeding were excised from the 20-page official medical record, which was not issued until June 1953, more than three months after his death on March 5 that year.



Four Politburo members were at that dinner: Lavrenti P. Beria, then chief of the secret police; Georgi M. Malenkov, Stalin's immediate successor; Nikita S. Khrushchev, who eventually rose to the top spot; and Nikolai Bulganin.

The authors, Vladimir P. Naumov, a Russian historian, and Jonathan Brent, a Yale University Soviet scholar, suggest that the most likely suspect, if Stalin was poisoned, is Beria, for 15 years his despised minister of internal security.

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Beria supposedly boasted of killing Stalin on May Day, two months after his death. ''I did him in! I saved all of you,'' he was quoted as telling Vyacheslav M. Molotov, another Politburo member, in Khrushchev's 1970 memoirs, ''Khrushchev Remembers.''

But Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent dismiss Khrushchev's own account of Stalin's death, in the same memoirs, as an almost cartoonish distortion of the truth. With virtually everyone connected to the case now dead, the real story may never be known, Mr. Brent said in an interview this week.

''Some doctors are skeptical that if an autopsy were performed, that a conclusive answer to the question of whether he was poisoned could be found,'' he said. ''I personally believe that Stalin's death was not fortuitous. There are just too many arrows pointing in the other direction.''

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The book, like most such volumes, paints a chilling portrait of Stalin, at once deeply paranoid and endlessly crafty, continually inventing enemies and then wiping them out as part of the terror that killed millions and kept millions more in the toil that enabled the Soviet Union to leap from czarism to the industrial age.


Yet modern Russians are torn about his memory. The latest poll of 1,600 adults by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, released today on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death, shows that more than half of all respondents believe Stalin's role in Russian history was positive, while only a third disagreed.

By the poll's reckoning, 27 percent of Russians judge Stalin a cruel and inhumane tyrant. But 20 percent call him wise and humane -- among them the head of the Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, who today compared Stalin to ''the most grandiose figures of the Renaissance.''

Mr. Brent and Mr. Naumov, the secretary of a Russian government commission to rehabilitate victims of repression, have spent years in the archives of the K.G.B. and other Soviet organizations.

Russian officials granted them access to some documents for their latest work, which primarily traces the fabulous course of the Doctors' Plot, a supposed collusion in the late 1940's by Kremlin doctors to kill top Communist leaders.

The collusion was in fact a fabrication by Kremlin officials, acting largely on Stalin's orders. By the time Stalin disclosed the plot to a stunned Soviet populace in January 1953, he had spun it into a vast conspiracy, led by Jews under the United States' secret direction, to kill him and destroy the Soviet Union itself.

That February, the Kremlin ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north, apparently in preparation for a second great terror -- this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent.



But the terror never unfolded. On March 1, 1953, two weeks after the camps were ordered built and two weeks before the accused doctors were to go on trial, Stalin collapsed at Blizhnaya, a north Moscow dacha, after the all-night dinner with his four Politburo comrades.

After four days, Stalin died, at age 73. Death was laid to a hemorrhage on the left side of his brain.

Less than a month later, the doctors previously accused of trying to kill him were abruptly exonerated and the case against them was deemed an invention of the secret police. No Jews were deported east. By year's end, Beria faced a firing squad, and Khrushchev had tempered Soviet hostility toward the United States.

In their book, Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent cite wildly varying accounts of Stalin's last hours as evidence that -- at the least -- Stalin's Politburo colleagues denied him medical help in the first hours of his illness, when it might have been effective.

Khrushchev and others recalled long after Stalin's death that they had dined with him until the early hours of March 1. His and most other reports state that Stalin was later found sprawled unconscious on the floor, a copy of Pravda nearby.

Yet no doctors were summoned to the dacha until the morning of March 2. Why remains a mystery: one guard later said that Beria had called shortly after Stalin was found, ordering them to say nothing about his illness. Khrushchev wrote that Stalin had been drunk at the dinner and that his dinner companions, told of his illness, presumed that he had fallen out of bed -- until it became clear things were more serious.

More telling, however, is the official medical account of Stalin's death, given to the Communist Party Central Committee in June 1953 and buried in files for almost the next 50 years until unearthed by Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent. It maintained that Stalin had become ill in the early hours of March 2, a full day after he actually suffered a stroke.



The effect of the altered official report is to imply that doctors were summoned quickly after Stalin was found, rather than after a delay.

The authors state that a cerebral hemorrhage is still the most straightforward explanation for Stalin's death, and that poisoning remains for now a matter of speculation. But Western physicians who examined the Soviet doctors' official account of Stalin's last days said similar physical effects could have been produced by a 5-to-10-day dose of warfarin, which had been patented in 1950 and was being aggressively marketed worldwide at the time.

Why Stalin might have been killed is a less difficult question. Politburo members lived in fear of Stalin; beyond that, the book cites a previously secret report as evidence that Stalin was preparing to add a new dimension to the alleged American conspiracy known as the Doctors' Plot.

That report -- an interrogation of a supposed American agent named Ivan I. Varfolomeyev, in 1951 -- indicated that the Kremlin was preparing to accuse the United States of a plot to destroy much of Moscow with a new nuclear weapon, then to launch an invasion of Soviet territory along the Chinese border.

Mr. Varfolomeyev's fantastic plot was known in Soviet documents as ''the plan of the internal blow.'' Stalin, the book states, had assigned the Varfolomeyev case highest priority, and was preparing to proceed with a public trial despite his underlings' fears that the charges were so unbelievable that they would make the Kremlin a global laughingstock.

Mr. Naumov said in an interview today that that plan, combined with other Soviet military preparations in the Russian Far East at the time, strongly suggest that Stalin was preparing for a war along the United States' Pacific Coast. What remains unclear, he said, is whether he planned a first strike or whether the mushrooming conspiracy unfolding in Moscow was to serve as a provocation that would lead both sides to a flash point.

''I am told that the only case when the two sides were on the verge of war was the Cuban crisis,'' in 1962, he said. ''But I think this was the first case. And this first time that we were on the verge of war was even more dangerous,'' because the devastation of nuclear weapons was not yet an article of faith.



Mr. Brent said he believes that fear of a nuclear holocaust could have led Beria and perhaps others at that final dinner to assent to Stalin's death.

''No question -- they were afraid,'' he said. ''But they knew that the direction Stalin was going in was one of fiercer and fiercer conflict with the U.S. This is what Khrushchev saw, and it is what Beria saw. And it scared them to death.''

The authors say that Stalin knew of his comrades' fears, citing as proof remarks at a December 1952 meeting of top Communist leaders in which Stalin began laying out the scope of the Doctors' Plot and the American threat to Soviet power.

''Here, look at you -- blind men, kittens,'' the minutes record Stalin as saying. ''You don't see the enemy. What will you do without me?''


Correction: March 8, 2003

An article on Wednesday about the death of Stalin and the possibility that he was poisoned by Politburo members to avert a looming war with the United States misstated the title and author of a memoir that included such a theory. It was by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, not by Nikita S. Khrushchev, and published in 1992 as ''Molotov Remembers.''

Gori: Stalin’s Hometown

Matthew Stevenson

 July 4, 2025

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This is the twenty-third part in a series about riding night trains across Europe, Turkey, and the Near East to Georgia and Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (Trump devoted this week to browbeating the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to add more than $3.3 trillion to the national debt so that no billionaire is left behind.)

General Secretary Joseph Stalin, right, seated beside his mentor in the Bolshevik Party, V.I. Lenin. Photo by Matthew Stevenson, of a photo in the Stalin Museum in Gori, Republic of Georgia.

Creeping through the mountainous country, my train arrived in Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia) around 14:00. From the main station, but without GPS on my phone, I had to navigate on my bike to my hotel, which was on the far side of the city from the station (now folded into a cheap shopping mall).

Tbilisi is an elongated city on two sides of a steep riverbank, so I had to descend to one riverbank, and climb back up the other side. 

Modern Tbilisi is a bad city on a bicycle, as it has cobblestones everywhere and fleets of black SUVs careening at high speed. After a few wrong turns, I made it to my small (bike-friendly) hotel, but, as in Ankara, I wondered how I would fare on the bicycle for the next three days, riding around what felt like a racetrack.

In the new Cold War, Georgia is one of the swing states—with a foot in both the East and West. Many Russian businessmen and companies have operations in Tbilisi, and at the outbreak of war in Ukraine, many young Russians fled here to avoid conscription. 

At the same time, Georgia sees itself as a future member of the European Union, if not NATO, which in 2008 endorsed its “aspirations for membership,”which might well have triggered the 2008 border war with Russia (although mostly what started that fighting were the overlapping claims in contested border areas, such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia, with mixed Russian and Georgian populations).

+++

I had a friend in Tbilisi, so in the evenings we would have dinner and talk politics (whether it likes it or not, Georgia is in Russia’s sphere of influence, not NATO’s). 

During the days I was on my own, and the next day, at 8:40 a.m. I was on a direct train to the small city of Gori, where Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, aka Joseph Stalin, was born and spent his early years. 

The train arrived in Gori around 9:30 a.m., sooner than I expected. I rode in a leisurely way around the small city, knowing that the State Stalin Museum did not open until 10:00 a.m. 

Unlike Tbilisi, Gori is flat and modest. In twenty minutes on a bicycle it’s possible to see most of the downtown area. Just before 10:00 a.m. I locked my bicycle, seated myself on a bench in front of the museum, and waited until a guard unlocked the front door. 

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Parked next to the museum was Stalin’s private railroad car, which was of an earlier vintage than Atatürk’s “private varnish” (slang for a private railroad car). Also near the entrance is the small dwelling in which Stalin was born—his log cabin so to speak—that was moved to the grounds of the state museum.

I might not think much of Stalin as a man or political leader—he ran Russia as if it were all a Gulag camp—but the Gori museum does an excellent job of outlining his life, using original photographs, paintings, maps and wooden models. 

To be sure, it has the feeling of a folk museum from the 1950s (Stalin died in 1953). At the same time the museum is deadpan in its presentation of the general secretary’s life, as if to say: “Yes, he was from Gori, and we realize he was at the core of the Soviet Union for almost forty years, but all we want to do here is present the facts of his life: it’s up to you decide whether he was a hero or a monster. We’re not in that business.”

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A small watercolor painting represents the early years that Stalin spent in and around Gori, which when he was born in 1878 was part of Russia. The picture shows the young Stalin with three other boys playing with sticks in the countryside; a nearby photograph shows Stalin at age 11 with his ecclesiastical school choir. 

Not mentioned in the museum is strained relations with both his parents: his father was a drunk who beat him, and he later referred to his mother as “that old whore.” 

By age 20, Stalin was not just a young revolutionary, but a Marxist who to support the activities of the Bolshevik party worked as an armed bank robber, and not always successfully; there’s a picture from 1903 of Stalin in the Kutaisi prison (the photograph might well show a college graduating class around that time). 

I liked looking at the black-and-white photographs of the 1905 Winter Palace revolution, although when it happened, in January of that year, Stalin wasn’t there, despite being a rising star in the Bolshevik party. 

By the time Stalin met Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, Stalin had not just served time in prison but had been exiled to Siberia and come to the view that party politics are best practiced in the guise of an underworld mob. He would be in prison or Siberia for many years between 1905 and 1917. The museum has a wooden model of his house in Solvichegodsk, which is northeast of Moscow, to which he was sentenced in 1909.

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Come the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stalin was serving as the editor of Pravda, and later, in votes to elect the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, he came in third, behind Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev. Later that year Stalin became the People’s Commissar for Nationalities (which may explain his later obsession with ethnic cleansing).

During the Russian civil war, Stalin was everywhere—rallying troops or shooting them, as he best saw fit. He was among Lenin’s inner circle on the Central Committee and known for his ruthlessness. 

In the museum, there a picture (seen above) of the two comrades posing in 1922. Lenin is at ease; Stalin is leaning forward on his chair, not quite as comfortable in his skin. In 1923, when Lenin fell ill, Stalin either rushed to his side to comfort his ally or poison him, depending on your reading of Russian history. 

In any case, after Lenin died, Stalin took over the Central Committee and the Politburo, and ran the Soviet Union with an iron first for the next thirty years (not forgetting to have his rival Leon Trotsky killed with an ice pick in Mexico City in 1940). 

The child of a broken, violent home in the Caucasus, when it was shifting between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, Stalin grew up learning to trust no one, and he ran the Soviet Union as if each day he expected Ottoman janissaries to sweep through Gori and behead everyone in his village.

In the museum pictures of the “mature” Stalin, he’s always posing as the “father of the emerging nation,” and when shown greeting Mao or inspecting a tractor factory, he might well be Atatürk (whose troops he faced in the Caucasus).

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For all that Stalin was a ruthless dictator who thought nothing either of purging the officer corps in the Russian army in 1938 or deporting most of the Tatars from Crimea, he allowed the Soviet Union to drift into World War II wholly unprepared. 

His makeshift alliance with Nazi Germany from 1939–1941 allowed him to partition Poland and appear as one of Europe’s new strongmen, but this cynical accommodation with Hitler (who hated Bolshevism as much as he hated Judaism) was, as Talleyrand liked to say, “worse than a crime; it was a blunder.”

The fact remains that without military aid from Britain and the United States in 1942 at the time of Stalingrad, Hitler’s invasion would have driven Stalin from power. 

Stalin was additionally lucky in 1945, when it came time to deal with Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, that the American president was on death’s door and in no position to roll the Iron Curtain back to the Dniester River. Not could Churchill rally the West for yet another Russian intervention (as he did in 1919).

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While making my way around the museum in Gori, I obviously thought a lot about President Vladimir Putin’s current infatuation with the Soviet strongman, although at the beginning of his reign Putin was more associated with Peter the Great, who sought both an enlarged Russian empire and close relations with with western Europe.

I came to the conclusion that Stalin—more than Peter the Great—is the correct antecedent for Putin’s personal reign of terror, which fears contact with the West, runs Russia as a ward of the KGB, thinks nothing of grinding the military into the dust in endless border wars, and dispatches enemies either to prison camps or with poison.

Stalin ran the Soviet economy as a prison-camp assembly line while Putin’s economic policies are those of a new-age fascism, in which state assets—laundered through a captive oligopoly—are deposited directly into the president’s holding companies.

Stalin’s Potemkin Soviet empire collapsed in the early 1990s, in part because imperial wars in places like Afghanistan exposed the hollowness of the party (needless death on the frontiers, bankruptcy at home).

+++

In Ukraine, Putin thinks he can have it all—guns, butter, and a Soviet resurgimiento in the lands once awarded to Stalin’s stewardship at Yalta. 

If you listen to the Putin interview with the MAGA apparatchik Tucker Carlson, the Russian president’s map of Eastern Europe looks like many in the Stalin museum—with Ukraine and Poland vanquished and Europe partitioned along the banks of of the Oder and Neisse rivers. 

To realize his dreams, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany, and marched into Poland, the Baltics, and Bessarabia, while attacking Finland. Later, more than 2 million persons vanished in his Gulag archipelago.

Putin’s strategy is to use his Trojan horse (Mole President Donald J. Trump) to break NATO and restore the lands of the Warsaw Pact to Moscow.

It could well work, for a while, although the lesson that Stalin and now Putin never quite learned it that their enemies eventually get a vote, too.

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails; Appalachia Spring; The Revolution as a Dinner Party (China throughout its turbulent twentieth century); Biking with Bismarck (France during the Franco-Prussian War); and Our Man in Iran. Out not long ago were: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections, and The View From Churchill, about the places that shaped the life of the British wartime prime minister. His next books are Playing in Peoria (by bike across the American Mid-West) and Friends of Kind, a literary travel history of World War 

BAD PRESS; IT WAS TROTSKY'S FAULT
70 years after Stalin’s death: How Western propaganda has rebranded the Soviet dictator from villain to hero, and back again

The Georgian Bolshevik has been portrayed as a mass murderer, a vital friend, and a dangerous tyrant, depending on the mood of the day

©  RT

Joseph Stalin died on the 5th of March 1953. The Soviet leader was one of the “big three” winners of World War II, and his life, political career, and the effects of his policies have been extensively researched by Russian and Western scholars. 70 years later, 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. In the West, the condemnation of Stalin’s policies is now absolute, but that has not always been the case. 

The problem of Stalin’s legacy

The decades of Stalin’s rule over the largest country in the world were filled with terror that led to millions of deaths. After the Bolshevik revolution and the civil war, the Soviet power struggle went on for years and contributed to the subsequent instability of the country. Following the Ukrainian-born Leon Trotsky’s political defeat in 1927, Stalin consolidated his power. Trotsky had wanted a world revolution; whereas, Stalin intended to build socialism in one country. He introduced the collectivization of the agricultural sector, which involved the repression of kulaks (private farmers) and led to famine and the deaths of millions. 

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 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.

Soviet “not a step back!” poster ©  Wikipedia

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.

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Currently, Stalin is known in the West mostly for his brutality, and few academics and writers have taken the time to explore the man, the era, and the circumstances during his time in power. However, historians such as J. Arch Getty and Matthew E. Lenoe are more pragmatic in evaluating the leader’s role in the events of the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise, Karl Schlögel’s book ‘Moscow 1937’ provides a more complete picture of Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union. These researchers thoroughly describe the events of the purges and political oppression, but also note the unprecedented modernization and technological progress that occurred in tandem during the period. 

When Stalin won his political battle against Trotsky, the country was already completely shattered following the Bolsheviks’ merciless seizure of power, the subsequent civil war and Red Terror. 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.” 

As a general rule, historians work without a moral bias and a political figure is usually analyzed according to the state of the country when he came to power versus when he left. 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.”

FILE PHOTO. A reproduction photo of Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the

 All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in his office. ©  Sputnik

Stalin’s image before and after the war

What Western historians and journalists write today about Stalin is one thing, but one should not forget how the Soviet leader was seen at the time. For many in the West, the Russian Revolution and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” were a shining light in the East, a promise of better days, a real source of hope. And for a long time, Stalin was the incarnation of this light. Hence the nickname “Father of nations”, that Soviet propaganda and communists all over the world gave him. The weight of communist parties in countries such as France or Italy, controlled by the Communist International (Komintern) was a trump card in the hand of the USSR to propagate a favorable image of its leader among Western populations. The fascination was such that European communists were reluctant to engage in resistance against Hitler until Stalin gave a green light, following the beginning of Germany’s invasion of the USSR. But the masses were not the only ones to be fascinated by Stalin and what he incarnated. 

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The work of the genius German publisher and communist activist Willy Münzenberg had a supreme influence on intellectuals and poets all over Europe. Playing on the primordial fascination with this new economic model being built in the USSR, he monitored and/or created many “useful idiots” (or “fellow travelers”). Some, like André Gide or Arthur Koestler, went on to be quickly disillusioned, but it was not the majority. With the appearance of popular fronts in Europe and the turmoil of the Spanish civil war, many left-wing intellectuals maintained their position for a long time while enjoying an excellent reputation in elite circles. Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, Pablo Neruda, Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Romain Rolland… quite a lot of respected voices. Because of their left-wing sensibility, anticolonial stance, pacifism or idealism, they fostered a positive image of Moscow, and, consequently, of Stalin. Arthur Koestler’s novel “Darkness at noon”, which depicts the politico-psychological process of the 1930’s purges, was not followed by many of these intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sarte, for example, later moved from Stalinism to Maoism. 

Furthermore, people, such as the “Cambridge five” or physicist Klaus Fuchs, actively spied for the USSR. And it was to fight for a cause, not for money. Their contribution to the reinforcement of Moscow’s power and the creation of the first Soviet atomic weapons can not be underestimated. On yet another level, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had been sincerely impressed by the Soviet leader, with whom the American president had a courteous correspondence. 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.

FILE PHOTO. Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February 1945

. ©  Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev – who himself had an important role in the political oppression of the Great Terror – made a move which ultimately had an enormous influence on Stalin’s image. During the 20th Party congress, in order to consolidate his own power, the new leader of the USSR denounced the crimes of his former boss and the cult of personality he enjoyed during his reign. His speech and was a shock for communists in Europe who were now more divided than ever, but liberals could only rejoice. The USSR’s two main assets in Western Europe were subsequently fragmented. The Italian communist party sought domestic political integration, while the French communist party was paralyzed. The Congress triggered the beginning of a crisis of confidence regarding the Soviet Union. In a way, one can look at Krushchev’s political maneuver against Stalin’s image as the first blow to the entire Soviet structure.

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Stalin’s reputation would continue deteriorating as dissidents published books in the West, and his former Western intellectual admirers were denounced for their blindness. Furthermore, it is true that Stalin won a political victory over Trotsky, but the latter is better judged by history. Trotsky is now considered more as an intellectual and a victim, regardless of the atrocities he committed when in power – particularly in his Ukrainian homeland – and his ideas have not vanished. Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism” in the USA, was a former Trotskyist, and the political views of the architects and proponents of globalized financial capitalism mesh with Trotsky’s internationalist views. Whereas Stalin, with the disappearance of communist parties as propaganda tools and the fall of the Soviet Union, has simply become another bogeyman. It is still possible to encounter Western Stalinists, but those are usually Marxist intellectuals with no influence on the broader public. 

Stalin and Western rhetoric towards Russian leaders

Ivan the Terrible has been considered a monster for many centuries, because of his ruthlessness in internal politics, but also down to how he conquered vast territories and became a threat to the West’s own imperialism. The fact that he was a very important reformer is somehow ignored. Peter the Great, was no softer, but on the contrary, he is considered an interesting personality mainly because he opened “a window to Europe” and incorporated Western elements into Russian civilization. When it comes to Stalin and Trotsky, Western views favor the internationalist. Gorbachev and Yeltsin, with their wish to adapt to Western standards, are also considered “good” Russian leaders. Currently, the Western position has moved in the other direction with Vladimir Putin in power, who stated with his Munich speech back in 2007, that the times of a weak Russia were over. 

FILE PHOTO. Josef Stalin, 1937, Moscow, Russia. ©  AFP PHOTO

The Georgian is maybe the only one who has managed to be the object of both praise and loathing from the West. 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, and even the publication of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was postponed. A positively biased campaign was actively nurtured around him. 

Only progressively, during the Cold War, did the narrative change. However, it was very difficult to put Stalin in the same basket as Hitler, since the war had cost the USSR the death of roughly 27 million people and gave it a place at the table of victors. Traditionally, victors are the ones who write and rewrite history, but 70 years later, the West is more confident in its capacity to rewrite the story of the 20th century. And Stalin is more often now presented as an accomplice of Hitler who helped him organize chaos and terror in Europe.

Something which is clearly nonsense. 

This apparently incoherent attitude is better explained if we examine the power structures in liberal democracies. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the West has developed a system in which strong incarnations of power are not desired. By 1900, according to the American philosopher Sheldon Wolin, the US was already living under an “inverted totalitarianism”, that is to say a system where corporations and lobbyists rule while the government acts as a servant. In his famous 1928 book “Propaganda”, Edward Bernays explained: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”  

If Bernays’s conclusions are correct, it implies that the Western system doesn’t need statesmen and political reformers with a vision for specific nations but administrators and managers with short mandates. Angela Merkel’s 16 year tenure marks a notable exception in contemporary liberal democracies. However, Merkel has working as part of the European Union, with its sophisticated institutions, and heavy bureaucracy. This may explain why the length of her time in office has never been criticized, whereas the West frequently expresses its concern towards men like Putin or Xi remaining in office for long periods. 

However, as various crises have shown, liberal democracies temporarily embrace "strongmen" when it fits the political agenda. Pierre Conesa, a French specialist in geostrategy, is the author of ‘The fabrication of the enemy’ and ‘Hollywar: Hollywood, weapon of mass propaganda’. He explains how Western messaging resorts to a fickle cinematographic process of demonizing its enemy and presenting its side as heroic. Stalin fits this pattern, as he is the only man in the Kremlin who was ever treated as a dangerous man, then as a hero, and eventually rebranded as an incarnation of evil. 

By Matthieu Buge, who worked on Russia for the magazine l’Histoire, the Russian film magazine Séance, and as a columnist for Le Courrier de Russie. He is the author of the book Le Cauchemar russe ('The Russian Nightmare').