How Stalin’s Time Ended Contains Suggestions about How Putin’s Time Will, Trebeyko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 16 – One of the murkiest periods of Russian history, the last days of Stalin’s dictatorship and the year immediately following his death, was filled with developments that contain lessons for how any dictatorship may end, especially one that has gotten involved not only in a war against its own people but a war abroad, Nikita Trebeyko says.

            In a discussion of that period, the Russian blogger provides details about that period and both suggests and implies that both Putin’s last years and the time immediately after his departure from the scene may feature many developments that will resemble what happened 70 years earlier (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=66E652C634246).

            Among the many events of that now long-ago period he points to that may be echoed in the future three are especially instructive:

·       The death of Stalin led to the end of Stalinist terror but this did not stop immediately. Instead, the organs continued to operate by inertia, with more than 10,000 people arrested in the months after the dictator’s death, far fewer than before but not an insignificant number.

 

·       Many of the prison revolts that took place in 1953 happened because Stalin’s repression swept up into its net people with the experience of war and who thus knew how to organize and fight even the most repressive of rulers.

 

·       After the death of Stalin, the main struggle was between those who identified with the state and those who identified with the party. In the future, it is likely to be between those who identify with the state apparatus Putin built and those who identify with the ideological machine that he created.   

Obviously, much will be different; but as Trubeyko makes clear, certain continuities or perhaps better echoes are important. And they should be neglected when one thinks about the future.