Séamus Martin on a dictator mourned hysterically 50 years ago by Soviet people despite his reign of terror
Fifty years ago, on March 6th, 1953, Soviet radio broadcast a statement from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It began: "The heart of Stalin - comrade and inspired follower of Lenin's will, the wise leader and teacher of the Communist Party and the Soviet people - has ceased to beat."
By its end, people were thronging the streets of Moscow in an almost hysterical outburst of grief. Hundreds were crushed to death at the dictator's funeral. Describing the scene, the human rights campaigner and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov wrote: "People roamed the streets distraught and confused, with funeral music in the background."
Sakharov, much to his embarrassment in later years, was as emotional as anyone and cried bitterly. In a letter written at the time he stated: "I am under the influence of a great man's death. I am thinking of his humanity." His words are a testimony to the amazing hold Stalin had over the Soviet people despite the reign of terror he waged upon them.
He was an unlikely hero for Russians. Born in the town of Gori in Georgia, Joseph Djugashvili, later as a revolutionary to adopt the underground name of Stalin, "man of steel", spoke heavily-accented Russian. According to some reports he even deliberately mumbled case-endings for fear of making grammatical mistakes. But there was a magnetism there that blinded Russians to his alien nature and his essentially evil character. His control of the media, of course, played a part in portraying him as the saviour of Mother Russia in the second World War.
It is difficult, all the same, to explain the devotion he generated among his people. Soldiers went into battle with the words "Za Rodinu, za Stalina" (for the Motherland, for Stalin) on their lips. Even such a talented writer as Alexei Tolstoy, a count of the old empire and relative of the great Leo, descended into such drivel as: "I want to howl, roar, shriek, bawl with rapture at the thought that we are living in the days of the most glorious, one and only, incomparable Stalin! Our breath, our blood, our life - here take it, O great Stalin."
And take it he did. Estimates of how many people died on Stalin's orders vary. This is hardly surprising. Both sides invented their own figures, Westerners to exaggerate the excesses and Soviet "statisticians" to minimise the extent of the tragedy. It is accurate, however, to state in simple terms that Stalin murdered millions.
Despite all this, the Russians were by no means alone in their adulation. Bernard Shaw fell under Stalin's spell during his visit to Moscow in 1931. In an amazing act of sycophancy Winston Churchill, on behalf of King George VI, presented Stalin with a heavily jewelled Sword of Stalingrad "in token of the homage of the British people" at a ceremony during the Tehran conference in 1943.
Among the Kremlin insiders at Stalin's funeral much more sober behaviour was apparent. Those in the know had secrets to hide.
On the night of February 28th, Stalin and his closest colleagues watched a movie in the Kremlin and then retired to the dictator's dacha at Kuntsevo about 10 minutes drive away for what had become the usual night of feasting and heavy drinking. By the early hours of March 1st, Stalin had retired and his colleagues had returned to Moscow. When he had not woken by the afternoon of the next day one of his guards entered Stalin's bedroom and found him in a state of collapse. His associates were called and, it has emerged, the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, a fellow-Georgian, denied his master medical attention to ensure he died. A recent BBC Radio documentary has suggested that Beria may have poisoned him in the first place. In any event, Stalin's heart ceased to beat at 9.50 p.m. on March 5th.
In 1997 in Moscow I spoke to Vyacheslav Nikonov, grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister and close aide. Molotov, his grandson told me, when Stalin's death was confirmed went directly to Beria and uttered the terse words: "Get Polina back."
Molotov's wife, Polina, had been sent to the camps as a hostage to ensure her husband's good behaviour. Stalin, in classic paranoid fashion, trusted none of his party colleagues. Kirov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and in faraway Mexico, Trotsky, were among the many to meet their deaths on Stalin's orders.
The right, the left and the centre of the party were purged. Generals were rounded up and shot at a time when war with Germany loomed. In his book The Road to Terror, based on access to the KGB archives, Prof J. Arch Getty of the University of California, Los Angeles, has revised figures for party members killed on Stalin's orders down to a staggering 1.5 million. Writers strangely, were dealt with more leniently though some such as Osip Mandelshtam and Isaac Babel were to suffer, and Maxim Gorky was probably poisoned. But Anna Akhmatova, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak and many others were spared. The strangest case was that of Mikhail Bulgakov, whose play, The Days of the Turbins, despite its essentially anti-Soviet nature, became one of Stalin's favourites. He is believed to have seen it 17 times.
Despite the anti-Stalinism of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the mark of Stalin's rule remains. His grave is still bedecked with flowers by the elderly babushki, the grandmothers and great-grandmothers of Moscow.
In the Caucasus, where he first saw the light, Stalin has left Russia its most intractable present-day problem. On February 22nd, 1944, most of the Chechen and Ingush population of the northern Caucasus was rounded up on Stalin's orders and moved to the steppes of Central Asia, to return only in 1958 on Khrushchev's orders. Almost half-a-million people were taken out of their homelands by train and 80,000 may have died en route.
The bitterness bred by those days 59 years ago remains in the hearts of Chechen militants. The Chechen war rages on, largely unreported, as Stalin's legacy to 21st-century Russia.
Séamus Martin was Irish Times Moscow Correspondent and International Editor