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Review: The Last Days of Stalin

July 8, 2016 08:50
Frontline fellowship: Stalin (right) with Winston Churcill and Franklin D Roosevelt at the 1945 Yalta Conference

ByColin Shindler, Colin Shindler

1 min read

By Joshua Rubenstein
Yale University Press, £25

When Stalin died on Purim, in 1953, beggars in Jerusalem rattled their tin cans and cried "Haman is dead!" In the USSR, there were public tears and private joy. Huge, inconsolable crowds appeared in the streets and many participants were crushed underfoot in the mêlée. The body of the composer, Prokofiev, who had expired the same day, was unable to be moved from the house because of the large number of people outside.

Special services had been held in the Great Choral Synagogue as Stalin lay dying. Moscow's chief rabbi called for a day of fasting and prayer so that Stalin should not meet his maker just yet. As the writer Andrei Sinyavsky put it: "Stalin was inside everyone".

Joshua Rubenstein's extremely interesting account of the ailing Stalin's last days draws upon personal memoirs and new research - and conveys the deep fear inculcated during "the Black Years of Soviet Jewry".