Skip to main content

Fifty Three

Fifty three years ago, on March 5th 1953, Josif Vissarionovich Djugashvili died aged 74.

He had a stroke on March 1st. However it was many hours before any aid came to him. The fear he inspired meant that no one would disturb him. Even when he was found, befouled and lying senseless on the floor, he was left to lie still longer. Eventually he was put on a chaise longue. Finally, speechless and angry, he died. The tyrant Stalin was dead.

No-one knows how many people his regime butchered and tortured.

Even today so many still suffer from the loss of their family members. The degradation and hopelessness of Stalinism crushed the human spirit. Alcoholism was a frequent result. Those taken to Siberia, and who yet returned after the blessed news of Stalin's death were shadows of the people who had left. Millions upon millions of people were casually left to die, or worked to death or tortured to death. Even those who survived could never forget. The destruction of generations has left a lasting legacy. The rot of post-Stalinist Communism, while less monstrous, was more despairing.

A beautiful girl, when a small child, lost her father to an accident as the result of alcohol. What stability there was in her Soviet life was lost. Her late childhood and early teen years became a journey from place to place with no security. She has left her country and lives now in the West. Even now she can not feel comfortable in her own skin. Her pysche is frozen.

When we talk about the crushing of humanity that Stalin led, each individual bears the stress of these crimes even down the generations. As I think back on to the death of the monster, I think grim thoughts indeed. In those long hours that he lay, immobile and filthy- did he contemplate his crimes? Did he understand that his name would become reviled through the ages? That his death could only bring a leap of hope to the hearts of those he tormented? As he struggled with his own death, did he think of the deaths of so many others, for which he was directly responsible?

Part of me hopes that his death was hard- that every breath was an agony, that his fear and rage choked him as he lay helpless. Even I, unknown to him and far away, have been touched by the results of the vile machine he created. Love can be poisoned by the past that makes us who we are.

Yet in the end, the death of Stalin was just another old man finally entering the dark. Those of us who still walk in the light might think about what we owe to each other: to love one another or perish.

Fifty three years ago- nearly two generations. I wonder when the sorrow that this man caused can ever be healed.

Comments

James Graham (Quaequam Blog!) said…
But, but Seumus Milne in the Guardian assues us that Stalin was just misunderstood!
2:15 pm
Edis said…
Indeed Cicero. My Mother ( a young woman in Lithuania when the Soviets marched in) was in a sense emotionally a prisoner of Stalin until the day she died. A cold sliver of fear in the soul never to be melted out whatever other happinesses she could find.
6:18 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more