Abstract
The Soviet people learned on March 6, 1953, that their leader for the last quarter-century had died. Three days later Stalin was laid to rest in the Soviet Union’s most hallowed site, inside the Red Square Mausoleum, next to Lenin. People say that upon hearing of Stalin’s death every man, woman, and child in the Soviet Union wept. Russia, in that month when winter turns to spring, was a nation in mourning, and hundreds of thousands journeyed to Moscow to view the General Secretary’s body. Andrei Sakharov, the noted Soviet nuclear physicist and future leader of Russia’s successful anti-Communist movement, wrote that for days after Stalin died “people roamed the streets, distraught and confused, with funeral music in the background. I too got carried away.”1 Only in the dictator’s notorious labor camps was the news of Stalin’s passing greeted with nearly unanimous shouts of joy.
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Notes
Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 314.
Adam Ulam, A History of Soviet Russia (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. 215.
See Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962)
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Priscilla Johnson McMillan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967)
Chris Ward, Stalin’s Russia (New York: Edward Arnold, 1993), p. 186.
William McCagg, Stalin Embattled, 1943–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978)
Timothy Dunmore, The Stalinist Command Economy: The Soviet State Apparatus and Economic Policy, 1945–53 (London: Macmillan, 1980)
Werner Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946–1953 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982).
Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976
Elena Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy 1945–1964 (Moscow, 1993). Zubkova expanded upon some of this material in Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
Nicholas Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979)
Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).
See Bailes, Technology and Society; Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Moshe Lewin, “Social Relations inside Industry during the Prewar Five-Year Plans”, in The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
For details on Ordzhonikidze’s life, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995).
Although no comprehensive biography of Voznesensky exists, a detailed analysis of his thought and policies can be found in Mark Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
See, for example, Kendall Bailes, “Stalin and the Making of a New Elite: A Comment”, Slavic Review 39, no. 2 (June 1980), pp. 286–287
Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation, expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 61.
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© 2001 J. Eric Duskin
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Duskin, J.E. (2001). Introduction. In: Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite, 1945–1953. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919458_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919458_1
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