The mourning was real: In a populace that had been taught to regard Stalin as a living emperor-god, many genuinely adored him, or at least saw him as a stern but ultimately benign father. The neighbor went to the funeral, taking her young son with her, and they both got caught in the crunch and narrowly escaped being trampled-thanks mainly to the fact that the human wave carried them into a courtyard where they and hundreds of others were trapped for hours, unable to get out but relatively safe. Grandma declined, saying that she was worried about the crowds the other woman eyed her with visible disapproval at such petty concern for one’s comfort in the face of national mourning. It is also indirectly echoed in a story from my family lore: A next-door neighbor tried to persuade my maternal grandmother to go with her to the funeral. This grisly episode-which Armando Iannucci’s brilliant 2017 black comedy The Death of Stalin replaces with a fictitious scene of NKVD troops shooting mourners-is searingly depicted at the end of Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1991 drama, The Inner Circle. More than a hundred people were trampled to death in the crowds. What’s known for certain is that Stalin managed to add to his body count even after his death, collecting human sacrifices at his funeral like an emperor-god or a tribal chieftain. Others say that the figure is too low, leaving out millions of unrecorded deaths. (“Koba” was Stalin’s Georgian nickname.) More recently, Yale historian Timothy Snyder has asserted, based on archives opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the real figure is closer to 6 to 9 million. The figure of 20 million was one point widely accepted and even reflected in the subtitle of Martin Amis’s eccentric and somewhat muddled but memorable 2003 book on Stalin, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. His body count, which includes not only those executed but those who died in the gulag and in the “terror-famine” in Ukraine and other parts of the USSR, is still disputed. What else would you expect…Īgamirov’s dead father was one of untold millions: Along with Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, and Pol Pot, Stalin was one of the twentieth century’s masters of mass murder. We were always going to get this first-of-its-kind presidential portrait. The hosts were horrified: The Stalin cult was already being quietly phased out, but there was still no telling what could happen. One, Anatoly Agamirov (later a prominent music critic), got only the cold comfort of a letter notifying the family that his father, a casualty of the 1937 purges, had been “posthumously exonerated.” At a classmate’s party a few days later, 16-year-old Agamirov lost it at the sight of a Stalin bust on his host’s shelf he went on a furious rant, called Stalin a scumbag and a killer, and finally punched the bust in the face, knocking it off the shelf and breaking its nose. Some of my parents’ school friends at Moscow’s Central Music School were far less fortunate. tried to get smuggled out of the Soviet paradise to Israel-survived and came home, their sentences truncated by Stalin’s death and the dawn of Nikita Khrushchev’s “thaw.”
Yet he was among the lucky: His parents-who, unlike most political prisoners in the Stalin era, had actually done what they were convicted of doing, i.e. A half-sister old enough to be a guardian saved him and his younger brother from being sent to an orphanage but there were also relatives and family friends who, over the next six years, crossed the street if they spotted him. For me, it is also a part of family history: Both my parents grew up in his suffocating shadow-especially my father, whose parents were sent to the gulag in 1947, when he was 11 years old. Stalin’s twenty-plus year rule was one of the long, dark, exceptionally bloody nights of twentieth-century history. It is perhaps fitting that this anniversary is taking place just as the tyrant’s latest heir, Vladimir Putin, is fighting an insane war in a quest to rebuild Stalin’s empire-and in the process, perhaps, finally driving a stake through its heart. Sunday marks seventy years since the Madeath-or repatriation to Hell, if you believe in Hell-of one of history’s great monsters: Joseph Stalin, the seminarian turned Communist revolutionary turned all-powerful “ Red Tsar,” in the apt phrase of his biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore.
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