12/8/2023 0 Comments Puck news julia ioffe![]() So how did Stalin kill not just 1,000 or 10,000 people, but millions of them? But any of us could say the same thing and nothing would happen. During his lecture on Stalin’s terror, Kotkin asked, essentially, how can one man kill millions of people? Sure, Stalin could have said, kill the following 1,000 people. The first time I took a Soviet history class, it was taught by the legendary scholar and Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, who asked a question that has since been seared into my memory. I also think it won’t necessarily fix everything. Surely, one of them could put an end to the madness.īut as I also wrote last week, I think this desire is an admission of powerlessness. It is a fantasy that has been fed by numerous reports that no one in Putin’s government knew about the invasion or wanted it, and, now that the war is unfolding, they are horrified and in shock. Senators, like Lindsey Graham, who took to national television to beseech a Russian to kill Putin. Most are Ukrainains, some of them are Russian dissidents, and some are longtime Russia watchers. Death had not arrived in time to keep Putin from invading Ukraine, but it could still swoop in and end the war.Īs I wrote last week, this fantasy is flourishing wherever there are people who believe that Putin has committed a grave and criminal error in invading Ukraine. One Novosibirsk artist posted an image of Stalin’s funeral mask with the inscription, “That one died, and this one will, too.” The message from him and from every Russian posting about the anniversary was unmistakable: they were hoping and praying for Vladimir Putin’s speedy death-and for the relief they imagine it would bring. This year, the anniversary took on a new and weighty significance. “Petrified and mute,” she wrote, “I understood that a certain liberation had come.” And though persecution of dissidents returned with the ascent of Leonid Brezhnev to the Soviet throne, it never again reached the level and scale it had under Stalin. Even his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, felt relief on March 5, 1953. ![]() Stalin’s death also lifted the blanket terror under which most Soviets lived, fearing that a stray word to the wrong person could end with a bullet in the back of the head. But he died just in time, and his successors quickly unraveled the plan and let imprisoned Jewish doctors out of jail. There were rumors going around Moscow that Stalin was readying to deport millions of Soviet Jews, who had just survived World War II and the Holocaust, to Siberia. There was one immediate effect of Stalin’s death: it stopped the Doctor’s Plot, which Stalin, in his end-of-life paranoia, had hatched, alleging that Jewish doctors were poisoning their patients as part of an American and Zionist cabal. ![]() But many others quietly celebrated his death. When the dictator’s death was announced, millions genuinely grieved the passing of the Father of Nations, and hundreds were trampled to death in the crush of his public funeral. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, about 20 million people had passed through the Gulag. Exact numbers are hard to come by but according to historian Robert Conquest, in just two years, 19, some 7 million Soviets were arrested as “enemies of the people,” one million were executed, and 8 million more were sent to the camps. But most Russians-and Ukrainians-were touched in some way by the terror, simply because of its vast scale. Many of them have ancestors who were among the millions that vanished during Stalin’s Great Terror. This date has always been an important one for liberal Russians, people who hate Vladimir Putin and want their country to look more like Western Europe than the Soviet Union. On Saturday, March 5, millions of Russians solemnly marked the 69 years since Joseph Stalin died of a massive stroke, an event portrayed with surprising historical accuracy in the comedic film The Death of Stalin.
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