RUSSIA-BOOKS: Revisiting the Life – and Death – of “The Boss”

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 23 1996 (IPS) - Joseph Stalin is back. His visage glowers from posters at Russian political rallies, his memory is revered by Russian voters supportive of the resurgent Communist Party, and, in a recent scan of ‘The New York Times’, his name appeared 33 times in just six weeks.

Right on time, Russian playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky, most recently the biographer of Tsar Nicholas II, has come out with a new biography, simply entitled ‘Stalin’ (available from Doubleday, for 30 U.S. dollars). It shows the Communist leader known as ‘The Boss’ as brilliant, manipulative … and completely evil.

Under all his pseudonyms — from the Boss to ‘Koba’ to Stalin itself (“man of steel”) — Josef Dzhugashvili, a failed Georgian religious student, came to create a new religion in which he himself was prophet and god, Radzinsky claims.

Radzinsky’s access to the Communists’ “President’s Archive”, to Stalin’s own personal archives and to such previously unheard- from witnesses as Peter Vasilievich Lozgachev, Stalin’s bodyguard, uncovered new data to back his arguments.

It is from Lozgachev that Radzinsky obtains one of the most dramatic theories in his often suspenseful story: that Stalin was murdered by his aide, Lavrenti Beria, just before Stalin was to have hatched a plot to begin the Third World War.

Both hypotheses, needless to say, are contested by other historians. But Radzinsky points to Lozgachev’s discovery of Stalin’s body, and to the bodyguard’s testimony that Stalin’s colleagues left their leader dying without medical help for 13 hours. Beria later boasted of Stalin, “I took him out,” Radzinsky contends.

Beria, Radzinsky said in an interview, “understood perfectly well that he himself would be eliminated. Beria had two choices — either to die or remove the aged leader. He managed to accomplish the latter.”

But, even during the “de-Stalinisation” process launched by Nikita Kruschev after Beria himself was removed, the Boss’s influence remained, Radzinsky argues. He contends that Stalin truly earned his title of “Father and Teacher” by creating a new kind of man, “Homo Sovieticus”, who was completely obedient to the Party’s wishes.

“He told men to applaud the executions of relatives and friends, and they did it,” Radzinsky told IPS.