Like Putin Now, Stalin held Power to His Death But the USSR was in Trouble Making Change after Him Inevitable, Khlevnyuk Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 16 – In the wake of World War II, historian Oleg Khlevnyuk says, “behind the façade of a powerful superpower was hidden a cruel and in many respected weak regime which could not feed even the population of the large country and what is most important did not have any clear prospects for development.”

            Stalin retained supreme power right up to the end, the Higher School of Economics scholar says; but many around him recognized that his system could not continue unchanged, given its problems and the expectations of the population for better after their efforts in World War II (lenta.ru/articles/2022/01/26/old_stalin/).

            But it would have been “naïve” to expect that after the death of Stalin, “the Soviet Union could become a democracy,” Khlevnyuk continues. But “despite their conservatism, the heirs of Stalin did not have any other way out besides beginning to demolish many of the key elements of the Stalinist system.”

            The Moscow historian not surprisingly does not draw the obvious parallel between the situation Stalin at the end of his life and his successors after his death faced and that of Putin in his declining years and the successors who will come after him. But few reading Khlevnyuk’s careful recounting of the decade after World War II will fail to make the comparison.

            And the historian points to one additional factor of the last years of Stalin’s life that will only lead more people to see the parallels. He says that in 1952, there was “the apotheosis of late Stalinism;” and that “it seemed to many then that this was something that would last forever without change.”

            “But a year later, the most vicious and dark period of the Russian 20^th century ended in a natural way,” with the passing of the dictator and the system he thought he had put in place for all time.