Sheila Fitzpatrick’s ‘Death of Stalin’

I must confess that my first impression of The Death of Stalin (Old Street Publishing, 128 pp, £12.99) by the eminent Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was negative. This was for a simple technical reason: it lacks an index. I find it very difficult to read books without one—I never know where anything is and struggle to return to specific points.

My second impression was also negative. In the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, Fitzpatrick sides with Stalin. She argues that Trotsky’s quip calling Stalin “the outstanding mediocrity of the Party” was not shared by the majority of Communist Party members. They wanted stability, achievable aims, and Socialism in one country rather than permanent European revolution.

The book’s conciseness has been widely praised by reviewers, and it is indeed a virtue. However, brevity has drawbacks: important events can be overlooked or lost entirely. One glaring example is the enthusiastic reception of Golda Meir as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1948. This event significantly stoked Stalin’s antisemitism. He came to believe that Jews harboured dual loyalty—to the Soviet Union and to the new state of Israel—and therefore could not be trusted. His response was to eliminate anyone suspected of such disloyalty.

The first victim was Solomon Mikhoels, a leading member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). The JAC had been established during the war to support Soviet propaganda efforts, especially in the United States, and to raise funds from American Jews. After the war ended, the committee became redundant, and its leadership’s request for a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic in Crimea was viewed as disloyalty. Mikhoels was killed in a staged “accident”—run over by a lorry arranged by the secret service.

Stalin showed no hesitation with drastic measures. Of the 15 JAC members arrested and charged with spying for a foreign government, 14 were found guilty. Thirteen were executed after imprisonment, and one died under interrogation. The one who got away was the biologist Lina Stern, who was granted favoured status – a mere five years in the Gulag. She survived. One theory is that Stalin spared her because of her fundamental research on old age; aware that his own powers were failing, he may have hoped she could one day be useful.

On the whole, Fitzpatrick is too soft on Stalin. Having lived under his rule (or more accurately, under his boot) for eleven years, I can only see him as the greatest mass murderer in history, far surpassing even Genghis Khan. In her analysis, he usually appears as a disciplinarian—harsh but principled, a man of vision. To me, however, everything about him reveals only vileness.

Fitzpatrick is strong on de-Stalinisation. She properly discusses Ilya Ehrenburg’s pioneering novel The Thaw (1954), which gave the period its name, and she writes a good deal about Yevgeny Yevtushenko. I agree with her emphasis on Yevtushenko, though I feel his most daring and important poem, “Babi Yar” (1961), receives insufficient attention. The poem commemorates the Nazi massacre of over 100,000 people (including some 35,000 Jews killed in the first two days) at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev in 1941. It begins:

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.

It attacks the enduring, silencing antisemitism in Soviet society. Twenty years after the massacre, no monument existed. Official language consistently avoided mentioning Jews, referring instead to the “murder of peaceful Soviet people, children and elderly” on monuments, in Party speeches, and in history textbooks. In this sense, Stalin is guilty of silence.

Other notable omissions include the treatment of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow. Known to support opposition to Stalin, she was threatened by him: either fall in line or he would appoint another woman as “Lenin’s widow”. According to contemporary anecdotes, the favoured replacement was the veteran Bolshevik Elena Stasova.

A little-known episode from the Second World War, recorded in Churchill’s wartime correspondence, further illustrates that Stalin could never be trusted. In September 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, Polish Home Army insurgents fought the German occupiers while Soviet troops stood idle on the other side of the Vistula. Churchill was prepared to drop supplies, but the distance made return flights impossible without refuelling. He asked Stalin to allow British planes to land on Soviet-controlled territory. Stalin refused. His clear intention was to let the Germans crush the uprising, so that he could later arrest the survivors from the London-based Polish government-in-exile.

Stalin readily accepted planes and tanks from the Allies, but offered little in return. Between 1939 and 1941, Hitler and Stalin were in effect allies. Indeed, significant deliveries of Soviet war matériel continued to Germany until the last train on 21 June 1941. Churchill tolerated such behaviour because the Red Army proved to be formidable fighters.

Fitzpatrick also misses an important aspect of the Great Purge: the fate of family members of the falsely accused. Stalin solemnly promised that if the accused cooperated with the prosecution, their families would be spared. These promises were never kept. This goes beyond eliminating rivals; it reflects a vengeful desire to punish anyone who had ever belittled the “great genius”. It proves Stalin had no moral compass—he toyed with human lives as a cat toys with a mouse.

Another underexplored question is why so many accused confessed during the Purge. The most plausible explanation appears in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, a work frequently cited by historians (including Robert Conquest in The Great Terror).

According to Koestler, interrogators persuaded prisoners along these lines: “We know you are innocent, but you can render a great service to the Party by accepting the role of spy and saboteur. The Party demands that you sacrifice yourself to help unify the nation under its banner.”

In summary, while Fitzpatrick’s conciseness is a strength, it sometimes comes at the cost of omitting events and themes—such as Stalin’s late antisemitism, the Golda Meir visit, the fate of Krupskaya, family reprisals in the Purge, and the psychological mechanism behind the confessions—that are essential to understanding the full horror of his rule.

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