Memes

It was sad for hundreds of millions, both inside the USSR and even among fascists and capitalists, not to mention progressives the world over:

Impressive demonstrations of grief accompanied Stalin's passing. In his death throes, “millions of people crowded the center of Moscow to pay their last respects” to the dying leader. On March 5th, 1953, “millions of citizens cried over his loss as if they were mourning for a loved one." The same reaction took place in the most remote corners of this enormous country, for example, in a “small village” that, as soon as it learned of what had happened, fell into spontaneous and collective mourning. The generalized consternation went beyond the borders of the USSR: “Many cried as they passed through the streets of Budapest and Prague."

Thousands of kilometers away from the socialist camp, in Israel the sorrowful reaction was also widespread: “All members of MAPAM, without exception, cried”, and this was a party in which “all the veteran leaders” and “nearly all the ex-combatants” belonged to. The suffering was mixed with fear. “The sun has set” was the title of Al Hamishmar, the newspaper of the Kibbutz movement. For a certain amount of time, such sentiments were shared by leading figures of the state and military apparatus: “Ninety officers who had participated in the 1948 war, the great war of Jewish independence, joined a clandestine armed organization that was pro-Soviet and revolutionary. Of these, eleven later became generals and one became a government minister, and are now honored as the founding fathers of Israel."

In the West, it’s not just leaders and members of communist parties with ties to the Soviet Union who pay homage to the deceased leader. One historian (Isaac Deutscher) who was a fierce admirer of Trotsky, wrote an obituary full of acknowledgements:

After three decades, the face of the Soviet Union has been completely transformed. What’s essential to Stalinism’s historical actions is this: it found a Russia that worked the land with wooden plows and left it as the owner of the atomic bomb. It elevated Russia to the rank of the second industrial power in the world, and it’s not merely a question of material progress and organization. A similar result could not have been achieved without a great cultural revolution in which an entire country has been sent to school to receive an extensive education.

In summary, despite conditioned and in part disfigured by the Asiatic and despotic legacy of Tsarist Russia, in Stalin’s USSR “the socialist ideal has an innate and solid integrity.”

In this historical evaluation there was no longer a place for Trotsky’s harsh accusations directed at the deceased leader. What sense was there in condemning Stalin as a traitor to the ideals of world revolution and as the capitulationist theorist of socialism in one country, at a time in which the new social order had expanded in Europe and in Asia and had broken “its national shell”? Ridiculed by Trotsky as a “small provincial man thrust into great world events, as if by a joke of history”, in 1950 Stalin had become, in the opinion of an illustrious philosopher (Alexandre Kojève), the incarnation of the Hegelian spirit of the world and called upon to unify and lead humanity, resorting to energetic methods, in practice combining wisdom and tyranny.

Outside communist circles, or the communist aligned left, despite the escalating Cold War and the continued hot war in Korea, Stalin’s death brought out largely “respectful” or “balanced” obituaries in the West. At that time, “he was still considered a relatively benign dictator and even a statesman, and in the popular consciousness the affectionate memory of “uncle Joe” persisted, the great war-time leader that had guided his people to victory over Hitler and had helped save Europe from Nazi barbarity." The ideas, impressions and emotions of the years of the Grand Alliance hadn’t yet vanished, when―Deutscher recalled in 1948―statesmen and foreign generals were won over by the exceptional competence with which Stalin managed all the details of his war machine."

Included among the figures “won over” was the man who, in his time, supported military intervention against the country that emerged out of the October Revolution, namely Winston Churchill, who with regards to Stalin had repeatedly expressed himself in these terms: “I like that man." On the occasion of the Tehran Conference in November, 1943, the British statesman had praised his Soviet counterpart as “Stalin the Great”: he was a worthy heir to Peter the Great; having saved his country, preparing it to defeat the invaders. Certain aspects had also fascinated Averell Harriman, the American ambassador to Moscow between 1943 and 1946, who always positively painted the Soviet leader with regard to military matters: “He appears to me better informed than Roosevelt and more realistic than Hitler, to a certain degree he’s the most efficient war leader." In 1944 Alcide De Gasperi had expressed himself in almost emphatic terms, having celebrated “the historic, secular and immense merit of the armies organized by the genius, Joseph Stalin." The recognition from the eminent Italian politician isn’t merely limited to the military sphere:

When I see Hitler and Mussolini persecute men for their race, and invent that terrible anti-Jewish legislation that we’re familiar with, and when I see how the Russians, made up of 160 different races, seek their fusion, overcoming the existing differences between Asia and Europe, this attempt, this effort toward the unification of human society, let me just say that this is the work of a Christian, this is eminently universalistic in the Catholic sense.

No less powerful or uncommon was the prestige that Stalin had enjoyed, and continued enjoying, among the great intellectuals. Harold J. Laski, a prestigious supporter of the British Labour Party, speaking in the fall of 1945 with Norberto Bobbio, had declared himself an “admirer of the Soviet Union” and its leader, describing him as someone who is “very wise."14 In that same year, Hannah Arendt wrote that the country led by Stalin distinguished itself for the “completely new and successful way of facing and solving national conflicts, of organizing different peoples on the basis of national equality”; it was a type of model, it was something “that every political and national movement should pay attention to."

For his part, writing just before and soon after the end of World War II, Benedetto Croce recognized Stalin’s merit in having promoted freedom not only at the international level, thanks to the contribution given to the struggle against Nazi-fascism, but also in his own country. Indeed, who led the USSR was “a man gifted with political genius”, who carried out an important and positive historical role overall; with respect to pre-revolutionary Russia, “Sovietism has been an advance for freedom, just as, “in relation to the feudal regime”, the absolute monarchy was also “an advance for freedom and resulted in the greater advances that followed." The liberal philosopher’s doubts were focused on the future of the Soviet Union; however, these same doubts, by contrast, further highlighted the greatness of Stalin: he had taken the place of Lenin, in such a way that a genius had been followed by another, but what sort of successors would be given to the USSR by “Providence”?

Those that, with the beginning of the Great Alliance’s crisis, started drawing parallels between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany had been severely criticized by Thomas Mann. What characterized the Third Reich was the “racial megalomania” of the self-proclaimed “master race”, which had carried forth a “diabolical program of depopulation”, and before that the eradication of the culture of the conquered territories. Hitler stuck to Nietzsche’s maxim: “if one wants slaves, it’s foolish to educate them like masters." The orientation of “Russian socialism” was the precise opposite; massively expanding education and culture, it had demonstrated it didn’t want “slaves”, but instead “thinking men”, therefore placing them on the “path to freedom." Consequently, the comparison between the two regimes became unacceptable. Moreover, those that made such an argument could be suspected of complicity with the fascist ideology they sought to condemn:

To place Russian communism and Nazi-fascism on the same moral place, in the measure that both are totalitarian, is superficial at best; fascism at worst. Anyone who insists on this comparison could very well be considered a democrat, but deep in their heart a fascist is already there, and naturally they will only fight fascism in a superficial and hypocritical way, while they save all their hatred for communism.

• Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, Domenico Losurdo

Some truly terrible people are listed here, but that's Losurdo's style for the book: relying almost entirely on anti-communist sources to tackle the Red Scare demonization of Stalin (and the soviet project in general) after his death. Despair for Stalin's death was common among progressives of all stripes, and respect for him was common even among fascists and colonizers.