Seventy years ago, on the night of March 5, 1953, a certain Joseph Vissarionovitch Djougachvili breathed his last. He was better known under his nom de guerre, Stalin, “The Man of Steel”.
An oppressed people; a reign of Terror in the name of government; real enemies, or imaginary ones, forced to confess under torture to the most absurd of crimes; mass graves; purges; deportations; famines, censorship and “total” propaganda; a war waged against Hitler for the unimaginable price of 27 million Soviet dead; a divided Europe; and a Cold War on the point of heating up: this was the inheritance left by the “Vodj” (The Leader).
Three years after his death, in February 1956, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced “the excesses of his personality cult” during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. In 1961, his body was finally withdrawn from Lenin’s Mausoleum, on the Red Square, in Moscow, to be placed in more modest surroundings in the necropolis near the Kremlin wall. During the Perestroika, archives were opened and the truth on the 30 years of his reign was revealed.
