The Death of Stalin

The Death of Stalin (1975) is a biography by French author and journalist Georges Bortoli. Using writings and interviews with those close to the Soviet leader, Bortoli seeks to reconstruct the final months and weeks of Joseph Stalin prior to his death on March 5, 1963. According to Kirkus Reviews, "Stalinist history is horrifying and gallows-obscene—even after Solzhenitsyn and the rest—and Bortoli is a hold-your-breath writer—you won't look away.

The book begins with a summary of Stalin's life and career. Born in 1878 to an impoverished family in the Russian Empire, Stalin joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at the age of 20. Over the next two decades, he rose through the ranks of the party, becoming editor of its official newspaper Pravda. In 1912, when Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik party split from the RSDLP, Stalin began to raise funds for the new faction through several illicit activities including kidnappings, robberies, and racketeering. When Lenin and his party assumed control of the Russian government following the 1917 October Revolution, Stalin joined the newly established Politburo, the central authority of the Soviet Union and the highest governing body of the Communist Party. Seven years later, Stalin became the head of the Soviet government following the death of Lenin. Over the next ten years, Stalin sought to remake the Russian economy through the collectivization of the agricultural sector and accelerated industrialization. Because of these and other moves, the Soviet Union experienced major disruptions in food production that led to devastating famines in the country's grain-producing territories in 1932 and 1933. In Ukraine alone, an estimated 3.9 million died. In Kazakhstan, the death toll reached 2 million.

In the mid-1930s—in an effort, borne in part by paranoia, to consolidate his authority—Stalin embarked on what historians refer to as the Great Purge. In a widespread campaign of repression, Stalin executed up to 1.2 million individuals and imprisoned a million more because he deemed them enemies of the people. During World War II, Stalin initially signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, but Hitler broke the pact in 1941 when he invaded the Soviet Union. The Soviet Red Army successfully beat back the troops of Nazi Germany, capturing Berlin and ending the war in the European theater. The Soviet Union's subsequent annexation of various states in the Baltics, along with the establishment of Soviet-aligned satellite governments in Central and Eastern Europe, led to tensions with the United States and other Western countries in a conflict that came to be known as the Cold War. Following a 1946 famine that killed around 300,000 people, Stalin helped lead the Soviet Union through post-war reconstruction and to the development of a nuclear bomb in 1949, further exacerbating tensions with the West.



By 1952, the last year of Stalin's life, the Soviet leader was extremely ill and supremely paranoid. After one doctor suggested that he retire to improve his health, Stalin imprisoned the man. In September of that year, Stalin was part of an operation to fabricate evidence implicating a group of Jewish doctors in a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. The doctors were imprisoned and tortured at Stalin's direction, and they were only released after Stalin's death. Known as the Doctors' Plot, this was one of many anti-Semitic campaigns undertaken by Stalin late in his life. At least part of the reason for his increased anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions was his anger at Israel's increasing alliance with the United States, even though the Soviet Union was one of the first countries to extend diplomatic recognition to Israel. Bortoli also suggests that Stalin may have been inspired by Adolf Hitler, who used anti-Semitism to mobilize support under the banner of nationalism.

Stalin continued to purge the Communist Party leadership of Jews in an effort that culminated in the Slansky Trial in November of 1952. At Stalin's direction, 14 Communist Party leaders in the Soviet satellite state of Czechoslovakia were put on trial for their alleged involvement in a Zionist-American conspiracy designed to undercut the Soviet Union. Eleven of the defendants were Jewish. The proceedings were a farce—a mere show trial—and all 13 defendants were found guilty. Eleven of them were executed, while three others received life sentences. Most disturbing is that just before his death, there is evidence to suggest that Stalin planned to deport all Soviet Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Region in Eastern Siberia, as a prelude to imprisoning them in Nazi-style concentration camps.

On March 1, 1953, Stalin was found semi-conscious on the floor at his personal residence after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. For the next four days, doctors fed him by spoon and attempted a number of procedures to revive him, including the application of leeches. On March 5, Stalin passed away in what his daughter Svetlana called "a difficult and terrible death." While several individuals within Stalin's inner circle, including Lavrentiy Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov, were suspected of poisoning him, there is no concrete evidence proving that Stalin's death was the result of treachery.



The Death of Stalin is a disturbing examination of Joseph Stalin's final months of paranoia and illness.