Killing Stalin: An Interpretation in Three Acts

Abstract

Killing StalinAn Interpretation in Three Acts Stephen M. Norris (bio) The Death of Stalin. Directed by Armando Iannucci. 107 min. UK/France, 2017. Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. 364 pp. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. ISBN-13 978-0691145334. $35.00. Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, The Death of Stalin. 120 pp. London: Titan Comics, 2017. $24.99. Joshua Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin. 271 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0300192223. $35.00. Prologue The 3 March 1953 edition of Pravda carried two headlines. The first, “The Day of Our Motherland,” had a number of stories that provided content for this topic.1 One consisted of a report about a session held the day before at Moscow State University dedicated to the “work of genius” recently produced by I. V. Stalin, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.” Other reports showcased the achievements of the Soviet peoples: the labor of Soviet machine operators in Kiev, awards given to Moldovan Komsomol leaders, positive inspections in Cheliabinsk machine factories, the workings of Abkhazian sanatoriums (including one named after Stalin), updates on construction projects underway in Ashgabat, and the successful start to a [End Page 827] sugar factory in Belarus. The photograph accompanying these articles also captured these rosy depictions of Soviet life: it depicted new machines in the new factory built under the new five-year plan (the fifth overall), machines located in Kramatorsk in a plant named for I. V. Stalin. The second headline, “The Most Important Conditions for the Raising of Propaganda,” had a lengthy story that reported on the “millions of Communists and broad circles of Soviet intellectuals” currently meeting to study the “brilliant work” of I. V. Stalin, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” and how to use it to advance the cause of communism. The most important task facing these ardent readers of Stalin, the enthusiastic readers of Pravda are told, is to appoint appropriate propagandists to carry forth the word of Stalin, a duty defined as the “highest honor” for a Soviet citizen.2 Two days before this issue appeared, Iosif Stalin, whose work of genius was inspiring new propagandists, whose achievements helped bring about a “day of our motherland” and gave name to its machines, had been found on the floor of his Kuntsevo dacha in a puddle of his own urine. Stalin suffered a stroke after hosting Georgii Malenkov, Lavrentii Beria, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev for drinks and hijinks, as was usual. The guests left between five and six o’clock in the morning on Sunday, 1 March. By ten that evening, when Stalin had not emerged from his office, the guards who watched over his closed doors, too fearful to enter, asked Stalin’s long-serving maid, Matrëna Petrovna, to enter and bring him his mail. Thus it was she who found the Soviet dictator on the floor, unconscious, in his nightshirt and soaked with his urine. Stalin’s subordinates were soon called. They arrived on the scene and established a regimen to supervise his care. According to the memories of these men, Beria immediately began his behind-the-scenes machinations for power, with Khrushchev not far behind. They held off telling the general population about the state of Stalin’s health. Only on Tuesday, 3 March, as the party’s newspaper yet again extolled the genius of their great leader, his great recent work, and the greatness of the motherland he had built, did fearful doctors tell them that death was inevitable. The front page of Pravda the next day, 4 March, came emblazoned with a radically different headline, a “Government Message” about the illness of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. Meanwhile, the very same page on the very same edition of the very same newspaper carried a story that the Moscow City Council of Deputies unanimously elected “the great leader and teacher of peoples, Comrade I. V. Stalin,” as its honorary chairman on 3 March.3 [End Page 828] So we can conclude our prologue with a series of questions. How can we make sense of this? How can we explain and interpret...