Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Death of Stalin
If tragedy plus time is comedy, then what does comedy become? Insight? Farce? Revelation? It depends on what and who is writing about it. If the anglophone world’s best historian of the Soviet Union takes over from Britain’s sharpest satirist to deal with the death of a dictator, the stakes run high.
The Death of Stalin is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s 30th book in a career that has repudiated top-down monolithic Cold War models to develop an entire school dedicated to understanding the Soviet Union as a phenomenon as complex and multifaceted as the West.
In his final years, Stalin was paranoid and lonely, surrounded only by security, domestic staff and the Politburo old guard. With his powers on the wane, he purged Jewish doctors, an anti-Semitic policy that was foolish, given his declining health. After a night of heavy drinking, he failed to emerge from his room and was discovered paralysed.
Politburo members bickered over who should check in. A full-blown jostle for power was checked only by a reluctance to act too decisively lest Stalin wake up, recognise initiative as a threat and send them to the Gulag. This rich comedic vein was well mined by Armando Iannucci in his film adaptation of a French graphic novel. Luckily for the old guard and the wider world, Stalin never recovered.
Fitzpatrick’s short study treats the aftermath from multiple angles. In terms of power, the Politburo put up a united front and managed the transition well, for a while at least. For Soviet citizens it was like the “death of God”. Soon Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Gulag system shocked citizens out of their elegies. After initially being laid next to Lenin, Stalin’s body was reburied twice, ending up beneath Red Square. What lives on is the vast negative space left from 30 years of personality cult, a void that continues to haunt Russia to this day.
The opportunity to reset relations between the West and the USSR was squandered. Cold War suspicion has a habit of self-propagation. Soviet peace overtures were considered ruses, although both sides had a genuine interest in lowering tensions in the nuclear arms race. It didn’t help that each considered the other incurably expansionist and manifestly untrustworthy – a valid suspicion given the West continued to bombard Eastern Bloc states with propaganda while the Soviets maintained a rich program of clandestine activities.
The Death of Stalin picks a crucial moment and covers it in impressive breadth. Putin has rehabilitated Stalin as a beacon of strength untroubled by morality – it was eerie to see the Great Helmsman’s portrait adorn bus shelters for the Victory Day Parade in Moscow a decade ago. This, and the resumption of a Cold War mentality, makes this book a vital read for anyone wanting to understand how the evil that men do lives after them.
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "The Death of Stalin".
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