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.''

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').

The Ghost of Stalin Still Hasn’t Been Laid to Rest
Josef Stalin died 70 years ago today, having stamped his indelible mark upon the Soviet system. Stalin’s legacy continues to haunt the post-Soviet landscape, right up to the present war with Ukraine.

By Ronald Suny

March 5, 2023

Source: Jacobin


The event itself was quite banal — the dismal, solitary end of a life. Josef Stalin, at the time unarguably the most powerful man in the world, died alone seventy years ago today in his dacha, Kuntsevo, in the woods outside of Moscow.

He had been carousing the night before with his closest comrades — Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and a few others. They had watched a film and drunk quite a bit, and Stalin saw them off early in the morning in a very good mood.

He retired to his office, where he slept on a couch with instructions not to be disturbed. There on March 5, 1953, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. A long, slow final agony brought his sanguinary reign to an end.
Stalin’s Legacy

The legacies of a great despot, however, do not die with the man but still haunt the country he shaped for a quarter of a century. The author of a transformative “revolution from above,” which turned a vast agricultural economy into an industrial power second only to the United States, Stalin saw himself as the heir of Vladimir Lenin, who had in October 1917 brought their party, the Bolsheviks (later Communists), to power in the largest country on the globe.

But Stalin was the architect of a system based on state terror that undermined the original aspirations of the revolutionaries of 1917 to create a socialist state anchored in the active participation of ordinary people through the soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers. That first revolution was inspired by popular desires for democracy, in the socialist sense of empowerment of working people. Stalin’s second revolution was a desperate forced march into industrial modernity, driven by a leviathan police state that imagined itself to be the “vanguard of the proletariat.”

Western historians of the Soviet Union were divided between those who saw Stalinism as the inevitable outcome of Marxism, Leninism, or the utopian ambitions of Russian radicals, and those more doubtful about “iron laws of history,” who contextualized and historicized the degeneration of a popular revolution into a vicious despotism. Explanations for the rise of a second-level comrade of Lenin to supremacy ranged from Stalin’s personal drive for power to the opportunities for dictatorship (rather than democracy) offered by the backwardness of an overwhelmingly peasant society.

Stalin’s own mentor, Lenin, harbored serious reservations about the possibility of building a socialist society in Russia without the aid of successful socialist revolutions in the more developed West. He gambled that a seizure of power by militant Marxists in Russia, the “weakest link in the capitalist chain,” would propel workers in the aftermath of World War I to rise up and overthrow their own kings and capitalists.

But after a brief flurry of strikes, protests, and insurrections, Europe and the United States settled down into a new era of stabilized capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Soviet Russia was left isolated, and the Communists were forced to retreat into Lenin’s New Economic Policy or NEP (1921–28), a kind of state capitalism, and to make major concessions to the peasant majority of the population and the non-Russians of the new USSR.

After the death of Lenin in January 1924, Soviet Communists debated how to restore the devastated economy of the country, and the NEP seemed to work best as a cautious, moderate program of reconstruction. In the mid-1920s, Stalin and his close collaborator at the time, Nikolai Bukharin, banked on the productivity of the peasantry and promoted Lenin’s gradualist policy as the best road to build “socialism in one country.”

International revolution had receded as a possibility, except, perhaps, in colonized and semi-colonized countries. Even as Moscow’s usurpation of real sovereignty from the non-Russian republics made the Soviet Union more and more resemble an empire of a new type, the USSR saw itself — and acted abroad accordingly — as the major enemy of European imperialism.

In the period between the two world wars, the USSR was the source of inspiration for anti-colonial movements in what became known as the third world. The Communist International, which never managed in its thirty-four years to launch a single successful revolution anywhere in the world, nevertheless encouraged young radicals like China’s Mao Zedong or Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to gnaw away at the sinews of colonialism and Western domination. Outlaws in their own lands, they were for better or worse disciples of Stalin.

Building the State

Of the Communist leaders in the Soviet Union, in sharp contrast to his nemesis Leon Trotsky, Stalin was the least interested in the internationalism of Lenin’s vision. His principal concern was the preservation and progress of the USSR — its industrial development, its unity, and its security.

He was first and foremost an étatist, a builder and promoter of the state, and his idea of the state was one in which centralized power, the elimination of dissent, and maximal security had been achieved. What was imagined in the West as totalitarianism was never actually reached. The “little screws,” ordinary people of whom Stalin spoke fondly and condescendingly, never completely succumbed to the will of the state. But Stalin’s aim was as close to totalitarianism as could be imagined.

To eliminate the economic power of the peasants, he forcefully, brutally drove them into collective farms, appropriated their grain, and caused famines from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. To discipline the intelligentsia, he terrorized any deviation of the official line, ending the avant-garde experimentation of the 1920s and enforcing a conservative conformity that combined realist style with romantic depiction of an idealized Soviet people. And to enhance his own power, he deployed the police to eliminate all who stood in his way, including most of the closest associates of Lenin — among them Bukharin.

The legacy of Stalin remains deeply contradictory. The country was industrialized and became more urban. Despite the purges that decimated the highest ranks of the military, he and his generals forged an armed force able to destroy the menace of fascism. Stalin led the Soviet Union to a victory that made the world safe for capitalism and liberal democracy.

However, in the Cold War competition with the West, he opted to set up Stalinist regimes in East and Central Europe, isolate East from West, and hold firmly onto an external empire as a buffer against his feared opponents in Europe. The USSR lost the Cold War, not in 1991, but already by 1953 as the United States rallied the major industrial powers into the anti-Soviet NATO alliance, economically and militarily far more powerful than the Soviet-led bloc.

The countries of the Warsaw Pact suffered through an unequal competition for half a century until an idealistic reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to reduce the chasm between the two blocs and surrendered the spoils of World War II for aid from the West that never came.

Distrusting the People

Stalin was a Bismarckian realist, a Machiavellian master of political power, who believed it was better to be feared than loved. For him, politics was war by other means. He did not trust his own people, especially those closest to him, who lived precarious lives until the day he died. He remained suspicious of their deviations and wavering lack of faith, and at the end of his life referred to his closest comrades as kittens lost without him.

And he did not trust the working people to whom the whole Soviet project was dedicated. He told various people that the masses had the “psychology of the herd” — they were “like sheep who would follow the leading ram wherever he might go.” That ram was the vanguard party, as well as its leader. To a relative he confided his belief that the common people needed a tsar, “a person they can worship and in whose name they can live and work.”

He believed that he understood the dynamics of history and society; he had learned them from his reading of Marx and Lenin. But from an early age he was convinced that the scientific sociology of Marxism had to be effectively taught to the masses, who would have difficulty advancing beyond their personal life experiences.

What kind of socialist was Stalin? Was the emancipatory message of Karl Marx destined to end up in the tyranny of one man and his obedient party? What had happened to the trust in the possibilities of empowering ordinary working people and making it possible for them to govern themselves in both the political and economic realms?

Such an original socialist idea, buried in Stalinist Russia, required a deep faith in the potential of human beings to respond to and learn from both experience and education and seize the opportunity to emancipate themselves from capitalist (and statist) exploitation and religious illusions. Like other political thinkers on the Left, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, whatever their occasional doubts and setbacks, were confident that human nature contained within it the possibilities of acquiring socialist consciousness. That positive evaluation of human potential is the opposite of how conservatives and reactionaries think of human nature.

The Sword of Justice

For those on the Right, humans are condemned by their brutish nature — their original sin, their aggressiveness and competitiveness, their acquisitiveness, greed, and individual self-interest — to live in realms of inequity and exploitation. Creating a good society will do little to make humans good, they claim. As the reactionary writer Joseph de Maistre eloquently summed up the philosophy of the Right, “In a word, the mass of the people counts for nothing in every political creation.”

Or, even more to the point:

All greatness, all power, and all subordination depend on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Take from the world this incomprehensible agent, and in that very instant order gives way to chaos; thrones collapse, and society disappears. . . . The sword of justice has no scabbard; it must always menace or strike.

In the pantheon of political thinkers and actors, Stalin was a man of the Right, deeply suspicious of his own subjects, convinced that there was no alternative to governing through coercion and satisfying the basest needs of the people.

And yet, when his state was severely threatened by the deadliest political movement in modern history, he relied on those “little screws,” and they sacrificed themselves for a cause that the dictator had sullied. Stalin emerged as a beacon around which to rally. Before being executed by Nazis, victims shouted, “Za rodinu. Za Stalina” (“For the Motherland. For Stalin”).

Initially, Stalin was shocked at Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR, but he soon set the tone for the amalgamation of Russian and Soviet patriotism as he portrayed the Soviet struggle as a global resistance to fascism and a war of liberation. As Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer argue:


Despite the losses, Stalin conveyed optimism, contrasting the Soviet cause, defending one’s native land, with German aims, an empire to be built, in Hitler’s own words, on “the extermination of the Slav peoples.”

Russian and non-Russian nationalisms fused with Soviet patriotism, as Jonathan Brunstedt’s work has shown. A pan-Soviet internationalist, even supra-ethnic, story of the patriotic unity of the Soviet people was generated during the war and prevailed into late Stalinism and afterward.
Rising Again

While the images on Soviet posters of radiant working-class and peasant heroes and heroines of diverse nations did not reflect the actual lives people led, they represented ideals and aspirations that inspired colossal sacrifices. Yes, ordinary Soviet people worshipped Stalin, whom they were prevented from really knowing, but his cultish self-presentation gave them strength and guidance. The regime itself may have been criminal and thuggish, but its representatives and representations visually, in poetry, in prose, in celebrations, and in songs resonated in their affective connections to protecting a homeland and building a new society.

Some months after Stalin’s coffin was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in October 1961, the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko memorialized the event:


Slowly the coffin floated, grazing the fixed bayonets.
He also was mute- his embalmed fists,
just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside.
He wished to fix each pallbearer in his memory:
young recruits from Ryazan and Kursk,
so that later he might collect enough strength for a sortie,
rise from the grave, and reach these unreflecting youths.
He was scheming. Had merely dozed off.
And I, appealing to our government, petition them
to double, and treble, the sentries guarding this slab,
and stop Stalin from ever rising again
and, with Stalin, the past.

As Yevtushenko warned, Stalin’s phantom continues to stalk the Soviet and post-Soviet landscape, right up to the present war with Ukraine. The worst instincts of a dictator are on display in Vladimir Putin’s Russia: the overcentralization of power; the repression of dissent; the futile attempt to fool all of the people all of the time; and the search for security in expansion and isolation.

The Stalin Circle in Alberta

It was the New Left that created the term PC or Politically Correct to diferentiate itself from movements of Stalinism and Maoism which took the line that it was the Great Leaders way or the highway, to Siberia. Or in Alberta's case Fort McMurray.

In Alberta to be politically correct is to be PC, full caps.

Our PC's are the Party of Calgary, the Progressive Conservatives, under the Great Leader Ralph Klein.

The Party dominance is everywhere outside of Redmonton, which is the equivalent of revolutionary St. Petersburg (Leningrad).

The current power struggle in the party metaphorically is Stalinism rather than that of the earlier "Great Man" politicks; Bonapartism.

The dictator may pay a hypocritical homage to the tradition of popular consent by means of occasional plebiscites in which the people are asked to endorse some proposal desired by the government. But this purely formal consultation is usually carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation wherein the propagandists of the ruling clique predict the direst consequences unless the proposition is confirmed. What Are The Characteristics Of Bonapartism?

Why Stalin? Because the conflict in the Bolsheviks was a PARTY conflict. The same cannot be said of Fascist states of the time, which were Bonapartist, based solely on the Great Man; Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. Such Bonapartist regimes would become the model for post war Latin American nationalist movements such as Peronism.

Between 1928 and 1933, Stalin inaugurated the First and Second Five-Year Plans to achieve his goal of rapid industrialization. In many respects he was successful - by 1939 the USSR was behind only the United States and Germany in industrial output. The human costs, however, were enormous. Modern History Sourcebook: Josef Stalin (1879-1953 )

And Stalin oversaw the industrialization of Russia, while Ralph did the same in Alberta fulfilling Lougheeds original vision. Which makes Lougheed our Lenin.

But Bloshevism was all about the PARTY and internal faction fights. No different from the PARTY in Alberta. In Russia they sent you to work camps in Siberia, and in Alberta we too are now building work camps in our Siberia; Fort McMurray.

So in keeping with our metaphor, which is endorsed by no less an expert than Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason, here are the players in the game of the Bolshevik Power Struggle in Alberta as the Great Leader flounders and weakens.

Let's play pin the cult of personality on the Leadership contenders and the Great Leader, ala the politicks of the One Party State. Which are unique to the old Soviet Union and to Alberta politicks.

Think of it as a card game, for a pack of cards. Just in time for the Convention next weekend.

Seeking Klein's crown are: former provincial treasurer Jim Dinning, former economic development minister Mark Norris, backbench Tory MLA Ted Morton, Infrastructure Minister Lyle Oberg, Intergovernmental Relations Minister Ed Stelmach and Advanced Education Minister Dave Hancock

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Ralph Klein Stalin

"He is an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to his appetite for power. At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone"

Lenin became increasing concerned about Stalin's character and wrote a testament in which he suggested that he be removed. "Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands: and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. I therefore propose to our comrades to consider a means of removing Stalin from this post and appointing someone else who differs from Stalin in one weighty respect: being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate of his comrades."

While Vladimir Lenin was immobilized, Joseph Stalin made full use of his powers as General Secretary. At the Party Congress he had been granted permission to expel "unsatisfactory" party members. This enabled Stalin to remove thousands of supporters of Trotsky, his main rival for the leadership of the party. As General Secretary, Stalin also had the power to appoint and sack people from important positions in the government. The new holders of these posts were fully aware that they owed their promotion to Stalin. They also knew that if their behaviour did not please Stalin they would be replaced.

Ralph Stalin Purges Alberta Cabinet

Kliein: A man whose time has come?

The Social Credit Party, which ruled for 34 years, was seen as tired and out of fresh ideas when a newcomer on the scene, Peter Lougheed, swept them from power in an unthinkable rout in 1971. Klein himself has only been in power for 12 years, but the Tories have held onto Alberta for 35 years, since Lougheed’s first win. We don’t change governments very often, but for such a right-wing province, we do think collectively every three decades or so.)

EDITORIAL: Ralph has to go. Now.
Edmonton Sun, Canada -
It's time to go, Ralph. Next Friday, at your party's convention, you should do the honourable thing and resign as leader of the




Colleen Klein Nadezhda Krupskaya

Yep the brains in the outfit. Relegated by Stalin to the backstage, much like Ralph does with Colleen. She has attempted to ameliorate the Ralph Revolution with philanthropy.

Klein Outta Control

Ralph Klein Abuser

Krupskaya had opposed Lenin's calls for an early revolution but after its success she hid her political differences with her husband. Trotsky's main hope of gaining power was for Lenin's last testament to be published. In May, 1924, Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, demanded that the Central Committee announce its contents to the rest of the party. Gregory Zinoviev argued strongly against its publication. He finished his speech with the words: "You have all witnessed our harmonious cooperation in the last few months, and, like myself, you will be happy to say that Lenin's fears have proved baseless. The new members of the Central Committee, who had been sponsored by Stalin, guaranteed that the vote went against Lenin's testament being made public.

Jim Dinning Bukharin

Alberta's next CEO, Mr. P3, and leader in this pack of cards. Sitting on the outside looking in, and allowing the night of the longknives at the Convention to wreak havoc amongst the social conservatives in cabinet, causcus and the backbenches.

Bukharin's theory was that the small farmers only produced enough food to feed themselves. The large farmers, on the other hand, were able to provide a surplus that could be used to feed the factory workers in the towns. To motivate the kulaks to do this, they had to be given incentives, or what Bukharin called, "the ability to enrich" themselves.

Lyle Oberg Trotsky

Trotsky accused Stalin of being dictatorial and called for the introduction of more democracy into the party.

Calgary — Alberta Tory Premier Ralph Klein's long goodbye from politics is hurting the province and should be reassessed by party faithful, says a leadership hopeful who was turfed this week from cabinet for making “inappropriate comments” about the Premier.

Lyle Oberg, who was Alberta's infrastructure and transportation minister until he was stripped of the position for six months after a Thursday night caucus meeting, apologized yesterday for suggesting he would reveal government “skeletons.”

But he did not back away from his suggestion that delegates at next week's annual meeting of the Progressive Conservative Party should rethink Mr. Klein's plan to stay in the premier's chair effectively until the spring of 2008.

"Given the urgency of the challenges that face the province, and the amazing opportunities that lie before us, the impact of a two-year leadership race must seriously be considered," Oberg said Friday.

Deposed cabinet minister Lyle Oberg says he will spend the weekend considering his political future and whether he will remain in the race to replace Premier Ralph Klein as leader.

Appearing sombre and subdued, Oberg told reporters today the past couple days have been “a difficult time within caucus” but he gave no indication he plans to quit the race.

But he also appeared to criticize Klein’s decision to stick around for two more years and hinted that fellow Conservatives should send a message at a March 31 leadership review that they want a leadership contest before then.

“The vote is not a referendum on the premier’s leadership,” he said, reading from a prepared statement. “The premier has already said he is not running again. The vote is a vote on when the leadership should occur.”

Riding rallying for Oberg

Wendell Rommens, past president and treasurer of the Strathmore-Brooks riding association, said Oberg's call for delegates to vote their conscience was met with applause and reflects what has become a commonly-held view. "I think it's time for (Klein) to move on and I would say the sooner the better," Rommens said.

Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev united behind Stalin and accused Trotsky of creating divisions in the party. In April, 1937, Trotsky appeared before a commission of inquiry in New York headed by John Dewey. Trotsky was found not guilty of the charges of treason being made by Stalin.

Stelmach Zinoviev

After the death of Lenin 1924, Zinoviev joined forces with Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin to keep Leon Trotsky from power. In 1925 Stalin was able to arrange for Trotsky to be dismissed as commissar of war and the following year the Politburo.With the decline of Trotsky, Joseph Stalin felt strong enough to stop sharing power with Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev

Ed Stelmach, Klein's intergovernmental relations minister, resigned a week after the premier ordered ministers who want to run for the Tory leadership to step down by June 1 - even though the premier himself doesn't plan to step down for two years. Premier Ralph Klein said he was somewhat surprised that Stelmach decided to resign from cabinet so quickly. "I set June 1 as a deadline and I didn't expect it to happen this fast," the premier told his daily news conference.

Stelmach's move may bolster a sense of urgency among those looking for change.

It's all very confusing for most Albertans watching Conservative politics from a distance. Stelmach's public comments are very reassuring. He's a team player, he supports Klein and all party policies. "Officially, there is no race," said Stelmach, until Klein steps down.

At the same time, he told reporters his resignation means: "Look, there's no doubt about it. We're here, we mean business and we're in the race."

Yes, and there's a new urgency about that business.

Ted Morton Kamanev

On his return to Russia he was elected Chairman of the Moscow Soviet and became a member of the party's five-man ruling Politburo. He reached the peak of his power in 1923 when with Joseph Stalin and Gregory Zinoviev he became one of the Triumvirate that planned to take over from Vladimir Lenin when he died.

When Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev eventually began attacking his policies, Joseph Stalin argued they were creating disunity in the party and managed to have them expelled from the Central Committee. The belief that the party would split into two opposing factions was a strong fear amongst active communists in the Soviet Union.

Alberta cabinet ministers who want to take a run at Ralph Klein’s job in two years will have to resign their portfolios by June 1, the premier said Wednesday. Ted Morton, another leadership contender, called Klein’s action “a good idea for obvious reasons.”

Until now, the many Albertans who want their next premier to be ready to at least threaten separation with Ottawa in order to get the kind of respect and deference Quebec has received over the past 40 years -- and there are many of them -- thought their best choice was political scientist and Calgary MLA Ted Morton.

Morton is one of the fellas who developed the idea of building the Alberta firewall -- an idea that basically advocates the province taking full advantage of its jurisdictional rights -- such as establishing its own pension plan, having its own provincial police force, controlling its immigration etc. -- Morton was the closest they could get to threatening Ottawa to keep its paws off of our valuable oil and gas resources.

Not anymore.

This, in effect, means Morton's leadership hopes are severely dampened, since Norris has already raised about $1.4 million from some heavy hitters with more surely to come as the race heats up.

Mark Norris Sergy Kirov,

As usual, that summer Kirov and Joseph Stalin went on holiday together. Stalin, who treated Kirov like a son, used this opportunity to try to persuade him to remain loyal to his leadership. Stalin asked him to leave Leningrad to join him in Moscow. Stalin wanted Kirov in a place where he could keep a close eye on him. When Kirov refused, Stalin knew he had lost control over his protégé.

Budget not bold enough, says Norris

Norris suggested this week that sitting ministers would have an unfair advantage if they remained in cabinet.

Mark Norris, a former cabinet minister who lost his seat in the 2004 election, said he's glad to see Stelmach stepping away from cabinet to focus on the leadership.

"I was a little surprised that it happened this early, but I'm very happy about it," Norris said in an interview. "It's going to be good to get this race going."

Norris said he's been paying all of his own leadership expenses and he'll be glad to see more of the candidates doing the same, especially cabinet ministers.

"It'll not only put interest into the race, but interest back into the party."

Norris, the 43-year-old Edmonton businessman and former Alberta economic development minister who is chock-a-block with fresh, concrete ideas delivered with a folksy, Ralphy kind of charm.

Norris wants to better care for Alberta's seniors and disabled, believes in strategic investing at all levels of education, would institute a two-term limit for a premier and set election dates for the province.

But it's Norris' willingness to play hardball with the feds and even lead this province down the road of separation if necessary that will set him apart from the others running in this race.

Dave Hancock Genrikh Yagoda

Yagoda was a close friend of Joseph Stalin and in 1934 he was put in charge of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). In 1936 Yagoda arrested Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, and fourteen others and accused them of being involved with Leon Trotsky in a plot to murder Joseph Stalin and other party leaders. All of these men were found guilty and were executed on 25th August, 1936.

Klein's rebate musings anger many in party
Short-term view slammed by leadership hopefuls

Advanced Education Minister and leadership hopeful Dave Hancock also indicated he's not too keen on the idea of more cheques. Rather, the dollars should be invested in endowment funds and savings accounts, he said.

"My priority is that non-renewable resource revenue should be saved for the future in a manner which can expand our economy, expand our society and pay dividends long-term into the future," Hancock said Tuesday.

11. This could change everything for Dave Hancock's leadership bid. Over the past week, I was beginning to be convinced that Advanced Education Minister Dave Hancock would drop out of the race in the face of Klein's June 1st deadline, but I now think he may stick around the racetrack. Though I don't think he stands much of a chance at winning the leadership, I think he could probably top the list of "best Tory Premiers Alberta never had." Daveberta

Iris Evans Alexandra Kollanti

Evans gives Klein healthy boost

Alberta Health Minister Iris Evans says she's squarely behind Premier Ralph Klein and his leadership.

When Joseph Stalin gained power he sent Kollantai abroad as a diplomat. This included periods in Norway (1923-25), Mexico (1925-27), Norway (1927-30) and Sweden (1930-45). Kollantai retired in 1945 and lived in Moscow until her death on 9th March, 1952. She was the only major critic of the Soviet government that Joseph Stalin did not exterminate.