Why Putin's Russia is still haunted by the ghost of Stalin

“Spirit of Stalin, come and talk to me.” If you want to communicate through a medium with the Soviet Union’s feared dictator, Joseph Stalin, you can find a site on the internet via Russian Google. The occult has been in fashion with Russians since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, no doubt a reaction against the boring Soviet insistence on scientific rationality. It may be that those who seek to talk to the ghosts of Stalin and other famous historical and cultural figures are more interested in entertainment than politics.

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In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from the end of the 1920s until his death in 1953, has been given a respected place in the history books, his achievements as a nation-builder outweighing the mass repressions that for many decades sullied his name. Although Stalin was ethnically Georgian, opinion polls show that a majority of Russians now consider him one of the greatest Russian leaders of all time, along with 18th-century nation builder Emperor Peter the Great.

But it’s been a bumpy road for Stalin’s reputation. On his 70th birthday, in 1949, Stalin was praised to the skies – lauded as a genius, father of his people, beloved teacher, and guide – both in the Soviet Union and by communists and other sympathisers throughout the world. He had led the Soviet Union to victory after four terrible years of struggle with Nazi Germany in the Second World War, in which at the lowest point 40% of the Soviet Union was under German occupation.

Stalin’s closest political associates, members of the Soviet Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, joined in and orchestrated the praise. They respected Stalin, but also had good reason to fear him, remembering the mass purges of the late 1930s and, more recently, the anti-western and antisemitic campaigns of the postwar years, which carried veiled threats to themselves.

Stalin’s death in 1953 was treated as a tragedy by the Soviet population. But it was probably a relief to his closest associates; and, as Armando Iannucci showed in his 2017 film The Death of Stalin (the same title as my book), there were elements of black comedy as well. Stalin lived alone since his wife’s death, shuttling between the Kremlin and his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. Alone, that is, except for a small army of household servants and security guards.

But when, one cold morning in March 1953, Stalin failed to emerge in the morning, and then in the afternoon, nobody was brave enough to go in to check on him. When the housekeeper finally went in and found him unconscious on the floor, having had a stroke, she called his Politburo colleagues instead of the doctor. Only after they came out from Moscow (by this time it was the middle of the night) was a doctor called – and then there was a problem of whom to call, since all the usual Kremlin doctors, including Stalin’s personal physician, had recently been arrested in the so-called ‘doctors’ plot’. 

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As Stalin lay unconscious for several more days, his political associates scurried around helplessly at the dacha, a bunch of bungling fools, as Iannucci portrays them. Back in Moscow, however, they showed another side. Meeting in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, they quickly and efficiently announced the new government (headed by themselves).

On his death, they made pious speeches at the funeral, had his body embalmed, and placed it with that of his revered predecessor, Vladimir Lenin, in the Mausoleum on Red Square. The ritual formalities over, they immediately set about introducing major changes – ending the antisemitic campaign and releasing a million prisoners from Gulag for starters. They even signalled interest in better relations to the west, but this fell on deaf ears, and the Cold War continued.

The most dramatic act of  ‘de-Stalinisation’ was the secret speech given by Nikita Khrushchev at a conference of the ruling Soviet Communist Party in 1956 in which he horrified his listeners with chilling details on the slaughter of party cadres in the great purges of the late 1930s. That stimulated a passionate debate on Stalinism within the Soviet elites that went on in various forms for decades.

A further attack on Stalin’s memory in 1961 resulted in his body being removed from the Mausoleum and reburied nearby under the Kremlin Wall. A modest bust by a Soviet sculptor was added to the grave in 1970, and it has remained undisturbed ever since, despite the abrupt disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

As president of the successor state, the Russian Federation, president Putin speaks of Stalin with respect if not affection, but it’s the Communists – opponents of Putin’s United Russia Party, but enthusiastic supporters of his war in Ukraine – who remain Stalin’s biggest fan club.

The Death of Stalin by Sheila Fitzpatrick is out now (Old Street Publishing, £12.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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