HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/josef-stalin Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:01:41 GMT en hourly 1 This secret speech gave people heart attacks: when Khrushchev denounced Stalin https://www.historyextra.com/membership/khrushchev-speech/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:30:54 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/khrushchev-speech/ Seventy years ago, Nikita Khrushchev stood before a packed hall in central Moscow and delivered a four-hour denunciation of Josef Stalin, one that exposed mass terror and attempted to reclaim the legacy of Leninism. So what drove this extraordinarily radical move? And did the Soviet people buy Khrushchev’s message? When I was an undergraduate, a perennial exam question was ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’. The question gets to the heart of Soviet history, and I still ask my students to address it. What does it mean? It suggests that Stalin’s policies, especially in the 1930s, were either a logical consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 or they were a deadly departure from its promises.
At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin consolidated his personal hold on power, he made a sharp leftward turn. His programme was headlined by a centrally planned economy, the collectivisation of agriculture, and breakneck industrialisation. It sounds like the fruits of a socialist revolution.
Mass state violence accompanied this ‘great break’ in Soviet life. Collectivisation led to falls in grain output and the forcible transfer of some of it to industrial centres; famine followed, killing millions, worst of all in Ukraine. The network of Gulag labour camps dramatically expanded. Enemies of the people – innocent men and women – were shot in their hundreds of thousands during the Great Terror of 1936–38. Did these appalling atrocities subvert the liberations of 1917? Or were they the natural follow-up to the terrors of the civil war (1917–22) and a predictable explosion of the implied violence of socialism?
Generations of students have written essays about whether Stalinism represented the true colours of socialism or whether it had nothing in common with the real ethics of the left. But the question was also crucial in real time, not merely decades after the event. When Nikita Khrushchev posed the question – did Stalin betray the revolution? – he turned the course of Soviet history.
A rising Soviet star
Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to political power seemed to fulfil the promise of the Bolshevik revolution. He was born in the village of Kalinovka, in Kursk province, in 1894. He worked as a shepherd when he was still a child. It was a tough, poor, hardscrabble life.
When he was 14, the family moved to Yuzovka – today’s Donetsk – in the nearby Donbas. He trained as a metalworker and had the gift of getting on in life; when he got married in 1914, he and his wife had their own, quite decent apartment. But he worked crushing shifts during the First World War and then endured the lethal lottery of revolution and civil war, during which his wife died of typhus.
Khrushchev was a hard worker, gregarious, ambitious and politically curious. He immersed himself in the diverse socialist landscape of the revolutionary Donbas and became a Bolshevik. Like so many others with proletarian credentials, he was propelled forward and upwards by the revolution. He embarked upon a new career in party and government administration in what was now the Ukrainian republic of the USSR. He rose closer to the centre of republican power.
His bosses marked him out as a rising star. In 1929, they facilitated his move to Moscow. By 1935, he was in charge of Moscow city and region, a kind of super-mayor of the socialist capital. In 1938, he went back to Kyiv, but this time as boss of the whole Ukrainian republic. He was an ethnic Russian, but he had lived in Ukraine for half his life. The year after, he was elevated to the Politburo. Khrushchev had made it big, and he owed it all to the revolution.
He was a pragmatic careerist and a brilliant machine politician. But he was also a true believer. He saw the revolution as the great engine of social justice and mobility. It had the potential to improve living standards and to distribute these improvements equally. In time, the legacy of the revolution would deliver communism, the Soviet utopia of the future.
These principles formed Khrushchev’s view of Soviet socialism. Unlike Stalin, he was never one for the recondite nuances of the revolution’s classic texts. Instead, he equated his straightforward sense of socialism with Leninism. He revered Lenin, and never departed from an intense commitment to him. But neither did Khrushchev question the economic and industrial strategy that Stalin pushed forward in the five-year plans. Khrushchev agreed that extreme measures had to be used against ‘enemies’. The stakes were so high that no chances could be taken with the success of the Bolshevik project.
Khrushchev was complicit in the development of the Gulag and the prosecution of the Great Terror of 1936–38. As the leading figure in the administration of Moscow city and region, and then of Ukraine, he spoke in favour of the need to use extreme violence against enemies and he himself consigned significant numbers of people to execution. He had blood on his hands.
Yet even in the 1930s, he could not stop thinking about old colleagues and decent sorts who had ended up in the ‘meat grinder’. Their ‘guilt’ made no sense to him. He feared for himself and his family. But he had to go on; political life was like a moving train from which one could not depart.
Stalin’s suffocating embrace
During the war, after Kyiv fell to the Nazis, Khrushchev was transferred to the military as a political commissar, serving in Stalingrad and elsewhere. When the Germans retreated, he was sent back to Kyiv. In 1949, he resumed his old job in Moscow. Stalin constantly pulled him back and forth into a suffocating embrace, sometimes humiliating him but also placing him next to Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov at the top of the Politburo.
Khrushchev navigated the turbulent politics that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 to become the leading figure in a collective leadership of Bolshevik barons. His power base was not in the central government (like Malenkov) or the security services (like Beria), or the military-industrial complex, or a republic administration. It was in the party, of which he was first secretary. He played his hand well. By 1956, he was increasingly first among equals in the collective leadership.
The post-Stalin period was already known as the Thaw. In 1954, Ilya Ehrenberg released a novel with that name. The book seemed to sum up the shift towards a more open culture and addressed questions about private dilemmas as well as public life.
At the same time, Stalin’s cult of personality was being dismantled in an ad hoc way in many public institutions. Large numbers of prisoners were released from the camps shortly after Stalin died, while certain social improvements, notably in policy towards the collective farms, were already under way. But all of these processes were tentative, and there was no central vision that directed them. The metaphor of ‘thaw’ – the end of the Eurasian winter – seemed to make sense: heralding a new start but revealing filth beneath the melting snow; promising glorious spring, but subject to periodic re-freezes and bitter spells.
A terrible question
As party first secretary, Khrushchev looked at Soviet politics through a party lens. Party structures, institutions, appointments and events were under his immediate control and offered a comprehensible set of approaches for him to deal with the enormous challenges and risks of post-Stalin governance. There had not been a consistent approach to post-Stalin politics and society. A guiding message was missing. And the terrible question – what had happened to all those millions of missing people, and could it happen again? – remained unanswered.
Khrushchev called a Party Congress for February 1956. Congresses were the most important events in the running of the party, held once every few years. They assembled leading members from across the USSR and formalised the party’s approach for the next political cycle. It would be the 20th Congress in the party’s history; 1,349 delegates with full voting rights set off for Moscow.
Even while they were on their way, Khrushchev was wrestling with his own demons. Like so many other people in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had family members who had disappeared into the maw of Stalinist repression. Not long after the death of his son in military action in 1943, Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law was sent to the camps and endured 13 years of incarceration and exile.
The psychological and political legacies of Stalinism left Khrushchev uneasy and on edge, both as a person and as a top politician. The Presidium, as the Politburo was called between 1952 and 1966, commissioned a top-secret investigation into the Great Terror, led by the historian and senior propagandist Pyotr Pospelov. He and his team worked exhaustively through the archives, where the dreadful events were meticulously documented in file after file of denunciations, confessions, death sentences and quasi-judicial proceedings.
Pospelov read out the report to the Presidium on 9 February 1956. Khrushchev, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and the rest of the collective leadership sat round the table in the Kremlin. He told them that 1,920,635 people were arrested between 1935 and 1940 for counter-revolutionary ‘crimes’ like so-called sabotage and espionage. A total of 688,503 were shot.
For all his complicity in events, Khrushchev did not have a bird’s-eye view of what had happened in real time. Now he knew the extent of it. Molotov and Kaganovich were old Stalinists who still sat in the Presidium and argued that this bloodshed was necessary collateral damage for building socialism, but Khrushchev and the rest of his colleagues no longer accepted this and recognised that it was time to set a new course. Khrushchev agonised in his memoirs about what he would say at the congress, but one thing seemed certain. “At this congress we had to take leadership of the party and country,” he argued to himself. “For this we had to know exactly what had happened before and what decisions Stalin had made.”
The 20th Party Congress began a few days later. Khrushchev waited until the main sessions were over and then gave a speech at an extra, closed session. The Hall of the Supreme Soviet in the Great Kremlin Palace was packed. Delegates included members of the Central Committee, top party officials and representative members from around the USSR, as well as a handful of specially invited Gulag survivors. What was about to happen? The anticipation was overwhelming.
Cruel and uncouth
Khrushchev came to the rostrum. He coughed, perhaps with nerves. The speech went on for four hours, but he got straight to the point. Stalin was a cruel, uncouth and essentially un-Bolshevik comrade who had created his own anti-revolutionary cult of personality. This was a diversion away from Leninism; in fact, before his death, Lenin had spoken out against Stalin and his personal flaws. Khrushchev described and condemned the Great Terror, and especially its devastating effect on the party, and blamed Stalin personally for its excesses. And he bitterly demolished what he described as Stalin’s incompetence during the Second World War, with the military errors, the terrible and unnecessary losses, and his wilful personal appropriation of the people’s victory.
Yet Khrushchev glossed over or missed out many other atrocities, perhaps most egregiously the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. He drew not only an explicit contrast between Lenin, the true voice of Bolshevism, and Stalin, its betrayer; he also tried to show that where Lenin had approved of violence, it had been proportionate and in the direct service of the revolution, unlike Stalin’s unlimited, unfocused and amoral atrocities.
The effect on the audience was extraordinary. Imagine: for 27 years, the cult of Stalin had accumulated and left its traces in the minds of the audience, many of whom were conformists who had been handed their careers by Stalin, or activists who were politically inspired by his ubiquitous and faux-humane messages. They all had something to lose. Top provincial officials were often desperately anxious about the risks of a sudden political change. Some of them really did have heart attacks and had to be carried out of the hall.
But the more carefully they listened, the more they caught the subtext. For a start, there would be economic continuities from the Stalin era. The basic mechanisms of central planning, industrial management and collectivised agriculture would not change. Khrushchev was airing the crimes of the Stalin period, but he was pinning most of the blame for them on Stalin himself, which sounded like a let-off for the officials who had directly or indirectly condemned so many to death during the purges. And Khrushchev was saying that it wouldn’t happen again. This meant that the secret police would no longer be a threat to their personal safety or their job security.
Khrushchev was offering a political deal, an ideological relaunch, a limited quest for redemption, and the possibility – if only that – of coming to terms with the past. For all its flaws, it amounted to a new revolutionary vision and was a turning point in Soviet history.
This was the Secret Speech, delivered in a closed room, out of reach of radio microphones and western observers. The plan was to give the message to Congress delegates and for them to inform the party membership and then the wider population at ‘town-hall’-style meetings. By allowing news of the condemnation of Stalin to filter out in a controlled way across the USSR and the eastern bloc, the leadership hoped to reduce the chance of unforeseen consequences and even instability.
This was only partly successful. There were leaks. Major challenges to Soviet-style socialism arose in Poland and Hungary during 1956, culminating in the Hungarian Revolution and its deadly suppression. In Georgia, inside the USSR, commemorations of Stalin’s death took place in early March as they had done since 1953. Stalin was the nation’s favourite son, and before his death, when the Georgian Lavrenty Beria and others held key positions in Moscow, it had been a republic with particular privileges. As rumours about the Secret Speech swirled around the Tbilisi crowd, opposition voices emerged and protests began; it was eventually ended by force, during which at least 15 civilians were killed.
- Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island
Meanwhile, party representatives and activists took the speech to the membership. Anna Pankratova was a leading historian, a veteran specialist in the revolutionary movement. She spoke about the Secret Speech at nine local party meetings between 20 and 23 March: 5,930 people showed up and asked 825 questions. Among many other worries, they wondered why it had taken Khrushchev so long to make the speech and why it focused so much on Stalin personally.
Many of Pankratova’s interlocutors were members of the Leningrad intelligentsia. All kinds of people went to similar meetings across the USSR and had diverse responses. Some wanted more radical change; some wanted more detailed information; some were afraid; some thought it better to forget than to remember.
A two-sided record
The speech became the fundamental basis of the Thaw. It signalled a new relationship between the population and the government, including a tentative version of Soviet-style rights. For the rest of the Khrushchev era and the few years that followed, culture became noticeably more diverse and open. Releases from the camps continued on a large scale, and the Gulag was very significantly downgraded. There was no repeat of the Great Terror; people no longer really feared arbitrary arrest. Questions about Stalinist violence were sometimes broached in public life, providing at least some answers to victims and their families. Some of those who were innocently convicted were legally ‘rehabilitated’, though this was sadly posthumous.
Accompanying this shift to a more person-centred politics and culture was a major change in social policy, which Khrushchev saw as a fulfilment of Leninism and a return to revolutionary norms. Living conditions got better thanks to a mass housing programme; cities across the USSR were transformed by the construction of five-storey blocks of separate family apartments. The pensions and benefits system was considerably expanded in 1956 and it was extended to the countryside for the first time in 1964. The length of schooling was extended. Spending on healthcare went up. Life became less pressured and risky, more stable and promising.
Yet the Soviet Union remained a dictatorship. People were not free to travel abroad. Political censorship persisted. Central planning reduced normal levels of consumption. The KGB was powerful. The countries of east-central Europe remained socialist ‘satellites’ against their will. And while Stalinism as a complete system was gone for good, most of those who had been responsible for putting it into practice remained in office.
Khrushchev was a bifurcated politician, whose record had two sides to it. The Thaw in Soviet life that was his signal achievement was likewise complex and nuanced. But when it came to the question ‘Did Stalin betray the revolution?’, Khrushchev gave an historic response. He made an epoch-defining, big-risk, high-octane speech – one of the hinges of the whole 20th century – and then implemented a transformative sequence of reforms that sought to reposition the Soviet Union on a Leninist footing. The results were mixed, but there was no going back
to Stalinism.
Dr Mark B Smith teaches history at Cambridge University and is the author of Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953–91 (Allen Lane, 2026)
]]> How Tudor London inspired literary genius https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-tudor-london-inspired-literary-genius-podcast/ Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:20:49 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-tudor-london-inspired-literary-genius-podcast/ Brett Greatley-Hirsch explores the ambition, innovation, and intrigue inside the heart of one of history’s most exciting writing communities In the bustling streets of Elizabethan London, a vibrant community of writers helped shape the future of the English language and literature. From poets seeking noble patronage to playwrights hustling for the hottest theatre stages, these wordsmiths navigated rivalry, collaboration, public critique, and bursts of creative genius.
In this episode, Emily Briffett is joined by Dr Brett Greatley-Hirsch as they dive into the world that produced Shakespeare, Marlowe, and countless other literary voices. Who were the people behind the plays and pamphlets that captivated a growing urban audience? And what do their feuds and friendships reveal about the pressures and passions of literary life in the late 16th century?
]]> Stalin's murderous vendetta against Trotsky https://www.historyextra.com/membership/stalin-murderous-vendetta-against-trotsky-podcast/ Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:44:52 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/stalin-murderous-vendetta-against-trotsky-podcast/ Josh Ireland tells the story of Stalin's decades-long persecution of one of the Bolshevik Revolution's most famous leaders, Leon Trotsky Mexico City, August 1940: a study door closes, an ice axe is raised and the Bolshevik Revolution’s greatest exile meets his grisly end. But what led to this dramatic moment?
Danny Bird speaks to Josh Ireland about Josef Stalin’s mortal enemy and the story behind their deadly rivalry. From his affair with artist Frida Kahlo to the pitiless destruction of his family, Josh explains how this is a story of exile, obsession and the long reach of totalitarian power.
]]> Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-vs-stalin-did-this-one-speech-cause-the-cold-war/ Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:30:35 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-vs-stalin-did-this-one-speech-cause-the-cold-war/ It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood? “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event.
Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come.
The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding.
Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”.
Strangling Bolshevism
Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia – and even to the USSR – was by no means one of unremitting hostility. And that was reflected in the Fulton speech, too. He was no admirer of tsarist autocracy, and even less so of Soviet communism. But during the First World War he eulogised Britain’s Russian allies, and was distressed when they dropped out of the conflict.
Churchill became the strongest advocate of intervention in the civil war that followed the October Revolution of 1917, and always regretted the failure “to strangle Bolshevism at its birth”. Following Hitler’s rise to power, he began to see the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Nazi Germany, and even as a possible ally. In a March 1939 interview, he asserted that the USSR had “hitherto shown no trace of the aggressive intentions” behind the recent actions of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. Even after the Soviets and Germans signed a non-aggression pact that August, he appeared to foresee that the USSR’s national interests would eventually force Stalin into an anti-German posture.
His prediction came true with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The functional but troubled Anglo-Soviet alliance that followed provides the crucial backdrop to the breakdown in relations that the Iron Curtain speech signalled.
Churchill continued to view diplomacy through a traditional ‘Great Power’ lens. That is to say, history was made via hard bargains between the paramount countries, recognising each other’s spheres of influence and legitimate interests, and often involving the ruthless sacrifice of weaker peoples and nations.
Churchill’s wartime meetings and correspondence with Stalin were based on this principle – and also on the belief that personal relations were crucial, and that his own individual charm could make a difference. He said in 1942 that he “liked Mr Stalin, liked his jokes and his humour, but could have gotten on with him a lot better if he could have talked with him directly instead of through an interpreter”. Combining tough talk with schmoozing and flattery, he believed that mutual recognition of British and Soviet spheres of interest represented the path to a safer future. The Iron Curtain speech of 1946 reflected the continuation of this approach, rather than a radical shift in outlook.
Falling for Stalin’s charms
Churchill, however, oscillated between optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of Soviet behaviour. After the February 1945 Yalta conference – at which the British, Soviet and American leaders discussed the postwar reorganisation of Europe – the prime minister told colleagues: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Yet as the Red Army’s advance progressed, he became increasingly concerned about the prospect of Soviet dominance of Europe. On 12 May, just a few days after VE Day, Churchill wrote to President Truman of the need to reach a concordat with the USSR before the British and American armies ‘melted’ with the onset of peace. “An iron curtain is drawn down between their front,” he added. This was his first rehearsal of a phrase he would later make famous.
Six days later, Churchill lectured the Soviet ambassador, accusing his Kremlin masters of “dropping an iron screen across Europe from Lubeck to Trieste, behind which we had no knowledge of what was happening”. Churchill’s diatribe did not have the desired effect. The ambassador told Moscow that “we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with an adventurer, for whom war is his natural element”. Indeed, Churchill was already pondering ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a military plan – quickly dropped – for a potential military conflict with the Soviets. But at the Potsdam conference of July 1945 (at which the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders convened once more), he was, in the words of foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “under Stalin’s spell again”. Eden reported that Churchill "kept repeating: 'I like that man.'"
Churchill’s participation in the negotiations was about to be brought to a sudden and unexpected end – for, before the Potsdam conference was concluded, news came through that he had been voted out of power in that summer’s general election. Churchill’s shock electoral defeat was a bitter political and personal blow, but it didn’t have a material impact on Anglo-Soviet relations: the new Labour government carried on foreign policy on familiar lines. When parliament reassembled, Churchill made his first public reference to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain”. His words were reported in the press but did not make headlines, and attracted little comment.
It should be noted that Churchill was now speaking in a new context, following the successful test of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though he could not say so openly, he hoped that the American monopoly of the new weapon would be the lever that would keep Soviet ambitions in check. He was thoroughly conscious of Britain’s weakening global strength, and believed that a strong relationship with the US was key to escaping its precarious position.
For this reason, the message he received from Truman that autumn was a godsend. The president passed on an invitation from the head of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to deliver the annual John Findley Green Foundation Lecture on problems of international concern. “This is a wonderful school in my home state,” scribbled Truman on the letter. “Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.” Churchill, still harbouring designs of returning to Downing Street, now had an opportunity to relaunch himself on the world stage, as well as to take a holiday in the sun.
During his lengthy absence from home at the start of 1946, Churchill sojourned in Florida and Cuba before travelling to Washington, DC. Truman accompanied him to Fulton by train.
As the train approached Missouri, a crisis was unfolding in Persia (now Iran) on the back of a speech by Stalin that seemed to anticipate conflict with the capitalist powers. The Soviets had failed to withdraw all of their troops from the north of Persia by the deadline that had previously been agreed. But though the president was increasingly incensed by their stonewalling stance, he was not yet ready to lay his fears and frustrations in front of his war-weary populace. With no official responsibilities, however, Churchill could speak frankly in a way that those in government could not.
- Read more | How the Cold War made the modern world
The bombshell moment
On 5 March, Churchill delivered his remarks before 2,700 people, all of them white. As one black American newspaper noted, the college was “located in a state where Jim Crow is a legal instrument of government and Negro boys and girls are barred from its portals by law”. The mainstream media made little of this shocking fact, but the message contained within the speech itself was regarded as a bombshell.
Churchill’s oration was 46 minutes and 5,000 words long. The ‘iron curtain’ phrase came at the two-thirds mark. It was part of a broader warning about the Soviet Union’s “expansive and proselytising tendencies”, which Churchill backed up with claims about Moscow’s search for “totalitarian control” in the countries of central and eastern Europe.
Yet despite the muscular rhetoric, scholars now tend to emphasise that the Iron Curtain speech was not a Cold War clarion call intended to stoke tensions. This is another way in which the speech has been misunderstood. Churchill undoubtedly wanted to reset relations through plain speaking, but he also wanted to show the Soviets that he understood their perspective. Hence he stressed his “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin”. He stated that he understood “the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression”. It was necessary, he said, to reach “a good understanding on all points with Russia” under the auspices of the recently formed United Nations.
Over the following days and weeks, few observers paid much heed to the more emollient sentiments in Churchill’s speech. The nuances of the former PM’s words were easily lost in the media tumult. In fact, the forcefulness of his overall message risked exacerbating the problem he was trying to solve.
“Churchill’s speech is sure some blockbuster, as one American paper describes it,” noted one ordinary observer, a female librarian back in Britain. “I read it first in full, and later heard extracts; and I must say that his delivery was so calm and flowing that the parts which had horrified me in print seemed perfectly innocuous as he spoke them.”
Churchill offered not only a diagnosis of the perils of deteriorating east-west relations but also a remedy – and in the US it was the latter that proved especially divisive. He urged that a robust response to the Soviets should be built upon “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States”. This seemingly innocuous phrase was widely (and correctly) perceived as a concealed call for a military alliance between the UK and the US.
This lit a fire, because former isolationists still distrusted the British empire, and progressive idealists believed that a bilateral pact would be a threat to the integrity of the UN. Leo Amery, Churchill’s former secretary of state for India and Burma, thought it was an error to link the admonitions about the Soviets and the alliance concept together in one speech. “The Americans are intensely suspicious of any attempt to inveigle them into being mere instruments of British policy in the Old World,” observe Amery. Meanwhile, Adam Clayton Powell, the first African American to represent New York in Congress, claimed that Churchill wanted “an English-speaking dictatorship” and “a form of super-nationalism based on race” that would plunge the world once again into war.
Truman had known of the speech’s contents in advance but, when the political kitchen heated up, denied having done so. Britain’s Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, took refuge in the claim that his government was “not called upon to express any opinion of a speech delivered in another country by a private individual”. However, in private he was less dismissive: “It will certainly have done good if it encourages the Americans to think and to recognise the need for the United States and the British Commonwealth to work together,” he said.
The destiny of the world
It is not clear if Churchill really expected the speech to cause the Soviets to change their attitude – but if so, he failed. “Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation,” Stalin told the Soviet state-mouthpiece, Pravda. “Mr Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.” With fear spreading, Moscow housewives started panic-buying. The Soviet authorities then tried to calm the public, spreading the message that “Stalin’s interview did not mean that war was in sight”.
The Fulton speech may have elicited a frosty reception in Moscow but, within a year, despite the initial misgivings, its once-controversial message had found widespread acceptance in the west. As tensions between America and the Soviet Union ratcheted up further, the 1947 Truman Doctrine committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. The doctrine is now seen by some historians as marking the true start of the Cold War. To this day, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic pay lip service to the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.
And Churchill was not quite done with the Soviet Union. Prime minister again from 1951–55, he ploughed his remaining strength into a vain quest for a rapprochement with the post-Stalin Kremlin. This was not because he had changed his mind; rather, his quest for détente was of a piece with his longstanding approach to great power relations and his belief in the importance of negotiating from a position of strength. He was convinced that the greatest chance of peace lay in convincing the Soviet government that they were confronted by superior force that would be used ruthlessly against them unless they mended their ways. “Then the communists will make a bargain,” he judged.
East-west relations would have continued declining with or without the Iron Curtain speech. Yet although Churchill did not start the Cold War at Fulton, he selected its defining image – and with carefully crafted vocabulary he created an indelible mental picture that influenced all subsequent debate.
Metal coinage
Was Churchill really the first to use the phrase 'Iron Curtain'?
“Iron curtain: a state of rigid censorship and secrecy (coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the line of demarcation between western Europe and the Soviet zone of influence)”. This was the definition included in the American College Dictionary. But the editors remained uncertain – had Churchill genuinely originated the term? In 1951, a member of that publication’s team wrote to him to find out.
There were good reasons for wondering. The metaphor is based not on conventional domestic drapes but on the fire safety curtains used in theatres. In a 1904 novel, Churchill’s friend HG Wells (pictured) described how, when a character is deprived of his freedom, “an iron curtain… dropped between him and the outer world”. The historian Patrick Wright credits the writer Vernon Lee (a pseudonym for Violet Paget) as being the first to deploy the term in an international relations context. She wrote of “war’s monstrous iron curtain” dividing the two sides after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.
After the October 1917 revolution, the phrase was used in a new sense. In her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia, Ethel Snowden described her arrival in Petrograd as part of a Labour delegation: “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!”
It is more than possible that Churchill was acquainted with these examples. But, if so, the influence was unconscious. In response to the query about the origins of his words, he replied: “No. I didn’t hear of the phrase before – though everyone has heard of the ‘iron curtain’ which descends in a theatre.” The dictionary definition stood.
The fact that Churchill saw ‘iron curtain’ as a standard expression may explain why he did not do more to attract attention to it. The official title of his speech was ‘The Sinews of Peace’. This, in turn, offers a clue as to why the famous phrase didn’t dominate newspaper headlines. The Daily Express, for example, ran with “CHURCHILL URGES EMPIRE ‘ALLIANCE’ WITH U.S”. The first BBC reporting, on the 11pm radio news, omitted the ‘iron curtain’ passage altogether.
Churchill was a genius with words. But even he did not know which of his own would be best remembered.
Was ChurcWas Churchill really the first to use the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’?hill really the first to use the ph
Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is co-host of the podcast Churchill: The Finest Half Hour
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ive-just-been-to-europes-weirdest-theme-park-and-came-face-to-face-with-josef-stalin/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:30:45 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ive-just-been-to-europes-weirdest-theme-park-and-came-face-to-face-with-josef-stalin/ There aren’t many theme parks that place statues of Soviet leaders next to Snow White and her seven dwarfs, but you’ll find one in southern Lithuania. Keith Lowe takes us on a tour of one of Europe’s most bizarre – and controversial – tourist attractions I am standing in a clearing in a Lithuanian forest, surrounded by guard towers and electrified fences. To all intents and purposes, it looks like I’m in a Soviet prison camp. Up above me a loudspeaker barks out orders in Russian. I hurry along a corridor of barbed wire. Up ahead, peeping ominously through the trees, I can see the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun.
But all is not as it seems. It doesn’t take long to realise that the loudspeaker is playing some sort of recording on a loop. The guards in the towers are not real either, but poorly disguised mannequins in theatre costume. And who are they guarding? Beneath them, in the barbed wire enclosure, is a row of Communist statues and half a dozen grazing llamas. Further along there are emus, cockatoos, a depressed-looking brown bear, and some statues of mass murderers. As for the gun, when I reach it, I discover that the only thing it is guarding is a children’s playground.
Rifles and roundabouts, cockatoos and cattle-trucks, Lenin and llamas: welcome to Grūtas Park, Europe’s weirdest open-air museum. Its combination of terror and kitsch is so controversial that it almost got shut down. I first came here in 2018 as part of my research for a study of Second World War monuments. But I felt compelled to return, because I still can’t quite believe that this place actually exists.
A brutal past
Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like several of its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania began the 20th century as part of Russia and only gained its independence in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Just over 20 years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, it was invaded by Soviet troops all over again. Then came the Nazis, followed once again by the Soviets three years later – and with each new invasion came new brutality.
In 1945, the country was swallowed whole into the Soviet Union. Anyone who refused to accept the nation’s new Stalinist rulers was arrested, deported to Siberia, imprisoned or executed. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians resisted this new oppression. They took to the forests and fought pitched battles against the combined forces of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police but in the end the uprising was brutally crushed: according to the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to Soviet gulags between 1945 and 1950, where between a third and a half of them died.
The Soviets then embarked on a program of Russification throughout the country. Russian speakers began moving into Lithuanian territories in large numbers; their descendants still live there today. Lithuanian culture was thoroughly purged of its bourgeois influences, and replaced by Socialist literature, art and architecture. Statues of Soviet heroes began to spring up in every town square, along with victory monuments and memorials to the glory of the Red Army.
Marx and mushrooms
When the country finally regained its independence in 1990, almost all the monuments to Lenin and other Communist figures were torn down. Countless statues were decapitated, cut into pieces with blowtorches, or crushed into rubble. Some were even dynamited.
In an attempt to save some of these sculptures for posterity, the new Lithuanian government decided to rescue some of them, with the vague idea that they might one day go on display in a museum somewhere. They invited institutions to bid for the right to display the statues, but unfortunately none of the nation’s museums was willing to take the project on without some kind of state funding. There was only one bid – from an entrepreneur named Viliumas Malinauskas – that did not ask for any government money at all. Malinauskas offered to pay all the transport, maintenance and restoration costs out of his own pocket. He was duly awarded the contract.
This was where the controversy began. Because Malinauskas was not a historian, an art critic or a museum professional – or indeed anyone who had any background in this kind of work. In fact, he was a former wrestling champion who made his living as a mushroom farmer. He now has a multi-million-dollar business exporting his mushrooms all over the world.
Some of his proposals for the sculpture park were quite bizarre. He wanted to build a special railway line, so that tourists from Vilnius could be brought here on cattle trucks, as if they were being deported to a Soviet-era gulag. He wanted to hire actors who would pretend to be soldiers, herding the tourists onto the trains. For the full gulag experience, Grūtas Park itself would be surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and the monuments would be displayed as if they were part of a Siberian prison camp. Unsurprisingly, critics began to call Malinauskas’s project a “Stalin theme park”.
It did not take long for the complaints to come rolling in. Local politicians opposed the building of the park. National politicians opposed the building of the rail line. A petition was drawn up denouncing the whole idea of his sculpture park, which was signed by Catholic Church officials, national NGOs, prominent academics, art professors and over a million other people around the world. “This part of history is full of suffering,” said one member of parliament, Juozas Galdikas, in 2000. “It should not be used for show business.”
- Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island
Perhaps the strongest voice of opposition came from former victims of the regime. More than 30 groups of former partisans and political prisoners banded together to protest about the sculptures going on display. They accused Malinauskas of trying to profit from their misery and described the statues as “monsters from a horror film”. Some of them even went on hunger strike. “Imagine yourself as a resident in a small village,” said one former independence fighter named Leonas Kerosierius, “and someone came and attacked your village, killed your brother and raped your daughter. Would you allow your neighbour to build a park for these executioners and rapists, or make money off these crimes?”
MPs pushed for a vote in parliament to take back the statues and keep them in State hands, and their resolution was accepted by a majority. But their victory was short-lived, because it was overturned by the Constitutional Court: Malinauskas had won the government contract fair and square, and Parliament had no right to take it away from him simply on a matter of taste. The most they could do was to create a government watchdog to oversee the construction of the sculpture park.
The whole controversy quickly became international news. Not only did it feature in newspapers throughout the Baltic countries, but also in other parts of Europe. It even made the newspapers in America, parts of Asia and Australia. “Miss the Soviet Era? Come to Stalin World” ran the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Snow White and Stalin
Grūtas Park officially opened to the public in 2001 and immediately proved a hit with visitors from all over Lithuania and beyond. Even before the official opening it had already seen around 100,000 visitors. Since then, it has added to its collection and become quite a well-established tourist destination.
People still occasionally call this place ‘Stalin World’, but there is actually only one full-size statue of Stalin in the whole park. I found him just beyond the zoo, peeping out between the trees like some fairytale troll. (The comparison to a fairytale is not made randomly: in a nearby glade, closer to the children’s playground, there is also a set of sculptures representing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here.)
It is easy to see why so many people became upset when the creation of this park was first announced. Many dissidents had spent their whole lives struggling against the Soviet system. In 1991 they had torn down these icons of Soviet power with great joy: it must have been deeply painful to see them so lovingly restored and put back on their pedestals, regardless of the setting.
The resurrection of Stalin’s statue was perhaps the most painful thing of all. This man had been responsible for tens of millions of deaths across eastern Europe, and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians. He had not been on public display for decades. (This particular statue had been taken down by the Communists themselves, back in 1960.) And yet here he was, standing in a sunny glade, waiting for tourists to come and take selfies with him.
Critics pointed to a worrying trend in contemporary Russia for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s memory, with brand new memorials to him being raised in many parts of Russia, particularly since the start of the current war with Ukraine. What if this trend were to spread to Lithuania and beyond? What if Grūtas Park, too, were to become a 21st-century shrine to this monstrous dictator?
The power of ridicule
Had this statue, and all the others, been given to one of the other bidders for the monument park contract, perhaps there would have been less controversy. Europos Parkas, in Vilnius, wanted to exhibit the statues purely as works of art, alongside a whole variety of avant-garde creations by artists from all over the world. Here, perhaps, the aesthetic qualities of a Stalin statue might have been divorced from its political meaning.
The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius also applied for the contract. It would have displayed the monuments in its main hall and courtyard. Had Stalin’s statue been placed here, it would have been seen alongside an extensive exhibition dedicated to his crimes. Many of those who protested against Grūtas Park wanted the museum to have won the bid precisely because it would have put the benign looking statues of figures like Stalin in a much, much grimmer context.
But there is something about the way that Grūtas Park displays its statues that is enormously refreshing. Seeing Stalin with a squirrel on his head takes away some of the nightmarish power he continues to exercise over us from beyond the grave. When birds are nesting in Lenin’s fingers, and children are climbing over the guns that were once aimed at Lithuanian partisans, these symbols of state power no longer seem as frightening as they once did.
This seems to be exactly what Viliumas Malinauskas is trying to achieve. In an interview with the Guardian shortly before the park opened, the proprietor was unapologetic about his peculiar approach to Lithuania’s troubled history. “People can come here and joke about the sculptures,” he said. “And that will mean Lithuania is no longer afraid of Communism.”
Grūtas Park is a bizarre mix of playground, zoo and atrocity museum. It trivialises the past in the most appalling ways, especially with its Disneyfied guard towers and barbed wire. Some of the museum displays in its barrack-style huts are more nostalgic than critical of the regime. And its commercial exploitation of Lithuania’s painful past is questionable to say the least: I managed to buy myself a Stalin mug and a Stalin keyring in the gift shop on my way out.
In fact, there are so many things about Grūtas Park that could be considered offensive that I hardly know where to start; and yet somehow, through its sheer banality, it comes closer to freeing Lithuania from its history than any of the more serious and thoughtful monuments that have been so carefully produced in other parts of Europe.
The magic ingredient is ridicule. I’m not sure how much this ridicule was ever intended by the park’s founder and owner, and how much is just a function of a ridiculous set-up. Nevertheless, it is there, and it is a powerful antidote to the atmosphere of fear that plagued this country for so many years.
Keith Lowe is an author and former military history publisher who has spent more than 20 years writing about the Second World War and its aftermath. His most recent book is Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024)
]]> Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fascism-no-thanks-why-britain-rejected-extremism-in-the-1930s/ Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:30:41 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fascism-no-thanks-why-britain-rejected-extremism-in-the-1930s/ Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars “Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”.
Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year.
In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It’s not that Britain narrowly escaped the extremism that swept across Europe in the interwar years – it never came even vaguely close.
Safe across the water
There were multiple reasons why Britain didn’t succumb to the appeals of fascism or other extreme ideologies. There was the security of being an island, and the stability of a long existence as a nation within fixed borders. There was the fact that, horrific as the numbers of British fatalities were in the First World War, they were dwarfed by those of other combatant nations. Similarly, although the Great Depression brought hardship to many, Britain was not affected as badly as other countries.
There was also the nature of the Labour Party, committed to the parliamentary process, as were the trade unions. And indeed the nature of the Conservative Party under the One-Nation leadership of Stanley Baldwin – as well as the electoral system that made it so difficult for rival parties to emerge.
- Read more | When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained
In his 1937 account of life in the industrial north, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made the suggestion that “cheap luxuries” kept the working class quiescent. “It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,” he wrote. But low-level consumerism was not unique to Britain. If the country chose “to make the best of things”, it was surely because the national culture was already averse to radical disruption.
It’s relevant, for example, that this was the great era of voluntary associations. There had been working men’s social clubs in industrial towns and cities for decades, but numbers grew substantially in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1922, its diamond jubilee year, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union could boast 2,300 affiliated clubs with more than a million members. The Women’s Institute, which was founded in Canada and had reached Britain during the war, grew in the 1930s to around 300,000 members. Rotary Clubs, founded in Chicago, had around 19,000 members, and the League of Nations Union more than 400,000. Perhaps most important of all was the British Legion, which merged various ex-servicemen’s groups in 1921. Within a decade, it had a membership of 300,000 – around one in 10 of those who had served in the forces.
Beyond these big networks, Britain nurtured a vast array of local societies and groups dedicated to single interests: photography, prison reform, amateur dramatics, vegetable growing, jazz records and a thousand other issues and hobbies. What they had in common, pointed out the novelist Phyllis Bentley, was a high level of self-regulation. “Each of these societies has a properly elected committee and chairman,” she wrote, “and conducts its business by means of an agenda, a proper procedure of moving and voting resolutions, an annual report and a balance sheet open to all members.” The British, she observed, were a people “unexcelled in the proper conduct of public business by entirely voluntary but strictly self-regulated methods”. This was the institutionalised form of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a term coined by the philosopher and politician to express the importance of societal bonds formed at a local and family level.
There were also political clubs – some 2,000 Conservative, nearly 1,000 Liberal, the early stirrings of Labour – but it was the institutions that weren’t based on party that really mattered. The non-aligned status of the various societies allowed for diversity of opinion, and for finding common cause. The societies operated on the basis of cooperation and coalition. It was from voluntary societies and trade unions, argued Baldwin, that the people had learned “the elements and principles of a democracy” which “they will never let go”. Democratic practice was thus embedded in everyday life, far beyond politics.
Cultural caution
Indeed, there was a striking absence of politics in British social life, and even more so in cultural life. The cinema, for example, was regulated by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body whose only remit was not to offend and which approved nothing more provocative than resilience in the face of adversity.
The espousal of doctrines of revolution or free love were banned, as were “references to controversial politics”, including “relations between capital and labour”. So a proposed movie of Walter Greenwood’s Depression-era novel Love on the Dole was rejected by the BBFC for having “too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty”. Permitted, however, was the comedy Off the Dole in which George Formby was “sacked” by the Labour Exchange after four years of not working, and which displayed nothing more contentious than the gentlest of political satire. (“A member of parliament is a man who gives your life for his country.”) Also banned by the BBFC was anything “calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign people”, as well as “the insistence on the inferiority of the coloured races” and “scenes calculated to inflame racial hatred”.
- Read more | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions
It was a very British take on censorship, quite unlike that of most European countries. It wasn’t any particular political viewpoint that was banned, but politics as a whole. “We may take pride,” said Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC, in 1937, “in observing that there is not a single film in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.” The BBFC had been established – and was still run – by the industry itself and, although its writ was never challenged, it had no statutory authority. This system of self-regulation was, acknowledged Labour politician Herbert Morrison, “a curious arrangement” but, he added, “The British have a very great habit of making curious arrangements that work very well.” In any event, it was surely preferable to the intense government control seen in Germany under Joseph Goebbels, or in Russia, where the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, was executed as a traitor in 1938 for not doing his job well enough.
Reithian values
An equally curious arrangement governed the BBC, founded in 1922, which operated first as a private company and then as a public-service corporation under royal charter. It had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain and became the most significant cultural institution in the country. By the end of the 1920s there were 3 million radio licences, 9 million by the end of the thirties – virtually every household in the country had a radio. It was a little odd, though. Even in its early commercial days, the BBC was never a conventional operation that responded to audience demand. Nor did it ever become an organ of government. Instead, general manager (later director-general) John Reith created his own vision of public service broadcasting, and mostly resisted external pressure from those who wished to shape this new medium.
There were restrictions, of course. Like the cinema, radio was not a place for disruption. The government, explained Reith, had given “an explicit instruction to avoid anything in the nature of religious, political or industrial controversy”. There wasn’t even a great deal of news. The newspaper industry, fearful of being made redundant, successfully lobbied the government to ensure that the first radio bulletin of the day wasn’t broadcast until 7pm, so that it wouldn’t harm sales of morning or evening titles.
That curfew was broken – never to return – during the nine-day General Strike of 1926, when independent newspaper production was suspended and the radio became the chief source of news for many. During the dispute, Reith complained about the government – “I do not think they treat me altogether fairly,” he wrote in his diary – but he strove to keep coverage calm and detached. Even in this moment of national crisis, the BBC was not a propaganda station – largely because Baldwin overruled those in his cabinet (most notably Winston Churchill) who wanted to commandeer the airwaves.
More broadly, as political coverage expanded, the BBC allowed for a variety of voices but had a clear bias towards parliamentary democracy: communists and fascists were seldom heard on the radio. It was ecumenical but definitely mainstream. So too was its approach to religion. Despite his own Presbyterian faith, Reith believed that religious broadcasting should be based on “a non-sectarian Christianity, confined, in respect of doctrine, to those simplest essentials to which all Christians of the west can adhere”.
With only one national channel, augmented in most regions by a local station, the intention was to occupy a shared middle ground. As with the cinema, there was no wish to ruffle feathers. And, also like the cinema, the BBC was essentially self-regulating.
For other cultural forms, there existed a patchwork of censorship that had evolved over generations without any sense of logic or coherence. The London stage was under the tight control of the Lord Chamberlain, while variety theatres were overseen by local councils. Books and exhibitions required no prior approval but were subject to the Obscene Publications Act. The Post Office was empowered to intercept mail, and customs officers to seize material brought in from abroad.
None of this was draconian. It simply smothered: a comfort blanket that insulated against conflict. The resultant lack of cultural engagement with burning political issues on stage, screen and radio was part of the reason why the country felt – and was – so much more stable in the 1930s than most of Europe. Culture in Britain was far quieter than in its neighbours.
There was something more that underpinned these cultural manifestations: a conviction that dictatorship ran against the grain of the nation. “Autocracy is abhorrent to the British mind,” wrote a columnist in the West Sussex Gazette in 1933, “and the kind we see in operation in Germany seems to us almost incredible.” The totalitarian state, with its intrusion into private life, offended a culture that had always prided itself on privacy and independence; somehow, it all looked so alien.
The leader-worship accorded to Hitler, Stalin and their ilk – the ubiquity of their images on posters, placards and public portraits – felt wrong. That role was already taken by the monarchy, whose iconography was woven into the social fabric, from the national anthem to banknotes and coins, postage stamps and pillar boxes. The words “an English Hitler”, reflected novelist Louis Golding in 1931, were “comically contradictory of each other”. (Which didn’t stop people from trying them out: the previous year, Labour minister Arthur Greenwood had used precisely that phrase to describe Winston Churchill.)
No need to get shirty
Equally alien, if not downright silly, were fascism’s quasi-military uniforms – all those monochrome shirts. “The number of nations that may be led to salvation, generally an undemocratic salvation, need to be limited only by the number of colours that shirts may be dyed,” mocked the Roscommon Herald. They became a standing joke in the literature of the time. There were Green Shirts in John Buchan’s 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds and again in Richmal Compton’s William the Dictator, White Shirts in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (both 1938), and unspecified Imperial Shirts in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940).
Best of all, in his 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse introduced Roderick Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley who leads the Black Shorts. As Gussie Fink-Nottle explains: “There were no shirts left.” In the same book, Wodehouse ridiculed “those pictures in the papers of dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words”.
That was another part of the problem with such figures: the posturing and the bragging rants looked out of place in a British context, in the same way that fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism doesn’t work in a home counties accent. When Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, he replaced his conventional tweeds and suits with a black polo-neck sweater tucked into black trousers, held up by a wide black leather belt, and his onstage persona adopted a more declamatory tone and exaggerated arm gestures. But he looked unconvincing, as though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatics society show.
If there was a single cultural symbol of Britain’s instinctive distrust of the dictator, it was perhaps ‘The Lambeth Walk’ – the song, and accompanying dance, that swept the country in 1938. A highlight of the musical Me and My Girl it was a simple and instantly catchy tune that cried out to be whistled cheerily by postmen and plumbers. The lyrics were even simpler, notable for the shout of “Oi!” and for the happy-go-lucky bridge: “Everything free and easy; do as you darn well pleasey.”
The song seemed to speak of a people free from an overbearing state – an anomaly in an increasingly authoritarian world. And it was embraced across the whole of society – danced, according to Mass Observation reports, “in Mayfair ballrooms, suburban dance halls, cockney parties and village hops”.
- Read more | From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right
Some 350,000 copies of the sheet music for ‘The Lambeth Walk’ were sold in Britain in its first year, and it was exported successfully, too. It was recorded by dozens of artists including American bandleaders Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, as well as Europe’s greatest jazz group, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. As the continent lurched towards another conflict in the year of Munich and the idea of “peace for our time” proved illusory, The Times predicted that the song would “be the ‘Tipperary’ of the next world war”.
In Nazi Germany, however, the song encountered stiff opposition. It was banned at the Shrovetide Carnival festivities in Munich and at the University of Heidelberg – where Joseph Goebbels had been awarded his PhD – and Hermann Göring reportedly forbade Luftwaffe bands from playing it. “This is degenerate music and the people who dance it are also degenerate,” thundered Der SA-Mann, newspaper of the Brownshirts.
From a British perspective, this was a fundamental clash of cultures and values. “There is nothing free and easy in Nazi Germany,” said the Liverpool Echo. “‘The Lambeth Walk’ must seem out of place in the land of the goose step.”
If that comparison seems a little fanciful – perhaps trivial – it made sense at the time. And even Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, drew exactly the same conclusion. “I understand that Hitler regards the Lambeth Walk as too democratic a dance for Germany,” he said. “All they can do there is the goose step.”
Alwyn Turner is senior lecturer in cultural and literary history at the University of Chichester. His new book is A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars (Profile, January 2026)
This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
]]> Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/nazino-gulag-cannibal-island/ Fri, 10 Jan 2025 08:30:44 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/nazino-gulag-cannibal-island/ Despite only housing prisoners for a matter of months, a small island on the Ob River in Siberia was such a violent and desperate place that it became a strong contender for the worst labour camp during the murderous rule of Joseph Stalin In 1933, the authorities of the Soviet Union intended to turn a small tract of land in Western Siberia, called Nazino Island, into a settlement where the dregs of society could be forced to farm for the good of the state. Instead, for the thousands of people sent there, it was nothing more than a death camp.
In terms of human cost, it is true that the tragedy is just one instance of suffering under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Whether from the forced labour camps of the Gulag, the violent repressions of the kulaks (wealthier peasants), or famines brought about by the brutal policy of collectivisation of agricultural production, untold millions had perished long before anyone arrived at Nazino.
Yet the regime ensured that details of the horrors of those few short months in 1933, which resulted in more than 4,000 deaths, were hidden for decades. To understand why, look no further than the epithet most often given to the place: Cannibal Island.
Why did Nazino Island become a gulag?
The idea proposed by the heads of the Gulag system and secret police was to relocate criminals and undesirable elements to previously uncultivated land and so develop self-sufficient communities.
In reality, there were nowhere near enough resources to make these ‘special settlements’ viable.
- Read more | When and why did the Soviet Union fall? Your history guide to the USSR
Far from hardened criminals or political dissidents, the majority of people sent to them had been arrested on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad for being caught without their internal passport.
One man was taken away after he stepped outside for a cigarette, while a young student was seized while waiting at the front door of his aunt’s apartment. Even those with the proper paperwork were not safe from the unforgiving arrest quotas of an authoritarian police state.
How Nazino Island became Cannibal Island
In May 1933, the first batch of prisoners arrived at Nazino Island, on the Ob River. They were already malnourished, sick and despairing after being crammed into barges for the journey – during which over two dozen had died – and it immediately became clear that there was zero chance of cultivating the swampy terrain. Besides, they had no tools or shelter.
For food, the prisoners of Nazino had only 20 tons of flour. Order broke down straight away, with fights breaking out over the distribution of the flour, gangs forming, and the guards taking perverse pleasure in hunting those who tried to escape as if it were a sport.
Those who managed to get some of the flour either suffocated on the dry powder or mixed it with water from the river and contracted dysentery. Starvation and disease set in quickly, followed by the first cases of cannibalism.
Soon, violent mobs murdered the weak to ensure a source of meat. Horrific accounts later gathered from eyewitnesses told of women being tied to trees and having body parts cut off and cooked. One of the local Ostyak people recalled another woman arriving at their house one night having made it away from the “Island of Death” despite having no calves.
The guards did nothing to prevent the atrocities; in fact, more prisoners kept arriving, as if they were animals on the way to an abattoir.
How did the Nazino tragedy end?
By July, when the camp was eventually closed, only 2,200 of the roughly 6,700 sent there remained alive. Many would not survive the transfer to other camps, let alone be healthy enough to be put to work. The guards, meanwhile, had been given short prison sentences; token punishments that amounted to a slap on the wrists.
Having heard rumours of the horrors of Nazino Island, a Soviet official named Vasily Velichko set out on his own volition to investigate. Having conducted interviews and seen half-eaten bodies hidden in the grass, he sent a damning report. The response: Velichko was kicked out of the Communist Party and his findings buried in the archives.
- Read more | Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine
It was only thanks to the efforts of human rights organisation, Memorial, in the late-1980s that the truth of Cannibal Island came to light.
On Nazino today stands a wooden cross and every year people make a pilgrimage to the island to commemorate those who lost their lives in that most desperate, most appalling of situations.
]]> How Stalin won WW2 https://www.historyextra.com/membership/stalin-ww2-podcast-jonathan-dimbleby/ Wed, 06 Nov 2024 07:30:19 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/stalin-ww2-podcast-jonathan-dimbleby/ Jonathan Dimbleby argues that 1944 was a defining year in the Nazi-Soviet clash and the long-term future of Europe In June 1944 Allied armies landed in force in northern France, and the liberation of western Europe began. But, the battle that really sealed Hitler's fate was taking place in the east, as the Red Army prepared an almighty assault against the war-weary Wehrmacht. Speaking to Rob Attar, broadcaster and military historian Jonathan Dimbleby tells the story of this crucial year in the outcome of the Second World War and reveals how it was pivotal in outlining the future shape of Europe.
Jonathan Dimbleby is the author of Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won The War (Viking, 2024)
]]> Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/josef-stalin-soviet-union-dictator/ Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:11:21 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/josef-stalin-soviet-union-dictator/ Stalin is widely regarded as one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants in history. From his childhood in the Caucasus to his career as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Robert Service explores his life and explains why he was constantly underestimated by his contemporaries Josef Stalin was the longest-serving leader of the world’s first socialist state, the Soviet Union, one of the principal architects of the postwar order and among the most ruthless tyrants to have ever lived. Undoubtedly, he was one of the 20th century’s most consequential figures.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Robert Service explains how the young Stalin had been seduced by revolutionary ideals of the age and ultimately joined the network of Marxists operating both inside and outside the territories ruled over by the tsar. As a Bolshevik, he played a key role during the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin ultimately emerged as the Soviet Union’s de facto leader, confounding those around him who had misjudged his political acumen.
During the 1930s, his Five-Year plans drastically altered the socioeconomic makeup of the USSR at a terrible human cost. His innate paranoia then instigated a bloody purge of his one-time comrades in the Communist Party as he sought to consolidate his grip on power.
Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the most vulnerable point in his dictatorship. Nevertheless, allied with Britain and America, the Soviet dictator would play a major role in reshaping the world following the defeat of Hitler’s regime in 1945.
By the time of his death in 1953, Stalinism – the ideology synonymous with his approach to statecraft and culture – had transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower. But not without cost: estimated tens of millions had perished due to his decisions. This would ensure his criticism by successors.
Where and when was Stalin born?
Josef Stalin was born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. Located in the mountainous Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas, Georgia was part of the Russian empire at the time.
However, some sources specify that he was born in 1879. Stalin preferred to “stay fairly quiet about most of his background”, says Service, choosing to indulge an aura of mystery.
When did Josef Stalin pick the name ‘Stalin’ – and what does it mean?
During his initial foray into radical politics, Stalin, like other revolutionaries, adopted a series of nicknames. One of his earliest ones was ‘Koba’, inspired by the bandit protagonist in Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 novel, The Patricide.
‘Stalin’, meaning ‘man of steel’, was a revolutionary nom de guerre he adopted in 1912. It spoke to his desire to be considered formidable, as well as being, says Service, “a Russian name, not a Georgian one”.
That was important because “he was increasingly identifying with the wider Russian revolutionary movement”.
- Read more | Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century
What was Stalin’s childhood like?
Stalin’s upbringing was rough, “involving fist fights in the streets and little gangs of boys,” says Service.
Nevertheless, he was a precocious child and an adept student. This convinced his mother that he should enrol at the Tiflis (now called Tbilisi) Theological Seminary and train to become an Orthodox priest in 1894.
How did Josef Stalin become a revolutionary?
It was via Georgian nationalism that Stalin first embraced radical politics. His teachers at the Tiflis found him to be increasingly rebellious and he quit the seminary before he could qualify as a priest. “He was a rebel and he turned from faith in God to faith in revolution,” says Service.
At the turn of the 20th century, while employed at the Meteorological Observatory, Stalin began to immerse himself in key Marxist texts and the Caucasus’s revolutionary scene.
His activities soon attracted the attention of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana.
“Georgian Marxists were notorious for blackmailing and intimidating industrialists in the Georgian capital,” says Service. “He got involved in all of this and [therefore] wasn’t quite as clean-handed a Marxist as other young revolutionaries were in Russia itself. He had a reputation for combining being a Marxist with being something of a Georgian patriot, and he was definitely someone who was involved with gangsters”.
When did Stalin meet Lenin?
Stalin met Vladimir Lenin in 1905 during the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a Marxist organisation, in Tampere, Finland (then part of the Russian empire). This occurred four years after Stalin had joined the party.
In 1903, the party had split along ideological differences, into Mensheviks (the ‘minority’) led by Julius Martov, and Bolsheviks (the ‘majority’) headed by Lenin. Both factions would later form breakaway parties during 1912.
Over the following years, Stalin’s revolutionary activities would lead to him being arrested and exiled to the far-flung reaches of the tsarist realm several times.
What role did Josef Stalin play during the Russian Revolution of 1917?
Stalin, like many Bolsheviks, was living in exile (in his case Siberia rather than abroad) when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. The collapse of the Russian monarchy followed.
Though nobody knew it at the time, this February Revolution was just one of two major convulsions that would take place that year.
Émigrés and internally exiled radicals (meaning those detained in Russia’s bleak hinterlands) flocked to major cities like Moscow and the then-capital, Petrograd (now called St Petersburg). Stalin was among them.
- Read more | Books interview with Robert Service: "Nicholas II brought the Russian Revolution upon his own head"
Upon his arrival, Stalin “barged into the leadership that already existed in a small kernel of men and women in the capital,” says Service. “He basically took over the central Bolshevik party apparatus until Lenin [who had been living in Switzerland alongside other revolutionaries] returned in April 1917.
“When difficult jobs had to be done throughout that year, whether it was running the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, or helping to set strategy in the central committee of the party, Stalin was there. He wasn’t a man who ‘missed the revolution’, as his enemies always later claimed”.
Later that year, after the Bolsheviks took power during the October Revolution, Lenin made Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ Affairs. This post gave him responsibility over the new regime’s governance of the non-Russian peoples living within the wreckage of the former tsarist empire.
What was Stalin’s relationship with Lenin like?
Their working relationship following the October Revolution was relatively fruitful, though not without some disagreements. “Lenin tended to use Stalin for a lot of the dirty and difficult jobs that needed doing,” says Service. “Stalin was a bruiser and the chief trouble-shooter of the Bolshevik leadership”.
By the 1920s, Lenin’s health – and his ability to engage in statecraft – was increasingly debilitated after a series of strokes. This would leave him largely bedridden until the end of his life in January 1924. Before Lenin's death, he recognised that both Leon Trotsky – architect of the Red Army and a convert to Bolshevism from the Menshevik faction – and Stalin, were emerging as likely successors to his leadership.
“Lenin found that the man [Stalin] that he had promoted to high party office had ideas of his own. Now, he had always had ideas of his own, but Lenin had been able to control him, moderate him when he thought necessary,” says Service.
By late 1922, the two men fell out over the position of Georgia within the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This vast new multinational polity, spanning northern Eurasia, fused the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with Soviet republics in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian Federation (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) on 30 December.
According to Service, Lenin “decided that if Stalin ever got into a position where he might be his successor, that would be a disaster for the party as a whole, and for the revolution itself”.
Therefore, Lenin dictated a so-called ‘testament’ that urged party comrades to remove Stalin from the post of party General Secretary. Its contents shocked Stalin and it was subsequently suppressed from wider circulation.
How did Stalin come to preside over the Soviet Union?
Following Lenin’s death, the factions within the upper ranks of the Soviet Communist Party hardened. Trotsky rallied party officials against what was perceived to be the creeping bureaucratisation of Soviet politics, which became synonymous with Stalin himself.
As well as Trotsky, a contingent of leading Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin also looked down on Stalin, says Service, because they thought he was an “ignorant provincial”. One contemporary, Nikolai Sukhanov, famously dismissed Stalin as “a grey blur which flickered obscurely and left no trace”.
Stalin, for his part, played up to this image. While the others pushed for worldwide revolution, Stalin struck a much more cautious tone.
- Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster
Service says that “this appealed to numbers of Bolsheviks after the Russian Civil War who were war weary and shared Stalin’s zeal to make the revolution a success at home first before turning their eyes towards Europe”.
By the late 1920s, Stalin had outflanked his rivals within the Communist Party by forging and betraying alliances with key party figures and playing each group off against the other.
Eventually, his greatest adversary, Trotsky, was ousted from the Soviet government and first subjected to internal exile, before banishment overseas. Stalin’s rise to power also hinged on his canny self-appointment as ‘high priest’ of the emerging cult of Leninism after the Bolshevik founder’s death.
Although Stalin’s eventual mastery of the Soviet Union was contingent on this policy of ‘socialism in one country’, Service maintains that Stalin really did believe in spreading the revolution once the USSR was in a strong enough domestic position to coordinate such an offensive.
What is Stalinism?
Stalin’s dictatorship would lead to the emergence of his own cult of personality, as well as a new ideology: Stalinism.
This new phenomenon, says Service, was “a brutal extension of Leninism” and he acknowledges that “for some people this is controversial… they think that Leninism and Stalinism are totally different things. I don’t.”
Service affirms that Stalinism consolidated Leninism’s commitment to a one-party state premised on state terror and the ultimate objective of communism’s victory throughout the world. It is synonymous with the dictator’s ubiquitous presence in official propaganda, the system of state surveillance, detention and mass murder, as well as the demonisation of ‘Trotskyite’ subversion.
As a totalitarian ideology, it permeated every facet of life within the Soviet Union, from literature and painting to architecture and the naming of cities, prompting Tsaritsyn to be renamed Stalingrad (today it is Volgograd).
What was the Five-Year Plan – and how did it lead to the Holodomor?
In 1928, Stalin launched the first Five-Year Plan – a colossal effort to rapidly industrialise the Soviet Union and bring agriculture under state control and central planning. This latter aspect, known as Collectivisation, marked a definitive break with the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by Lenin in 1921.
The cumulative impact of the First World War, revolutionary turmoil and civil war that had engulfed Russia for much of the 1910s, levied a heavy toll on the nascent Soviet economy. Adopted in March 1921, the NEP marked a tactical retreat from the Bolsheviks’ socialist measures.
It held sway for much of the ensuing decade and reintroduced limited private ownership and commerce under the supervision of the Soviet state to bolster the economy.
Always envisaged as a temporary measure, Service points out that by the late 1920s, the regime believed that the NEP had enabled “too many nationalists, street traders and priests” to gain influence within Soviet society.
Part of the Five-Year Plan entailed individual private farms being consolidated into larger units under the supposed collective ownership of peasants known as a ‘kolkhoz’. Similarly, ‘sovkhoz’ were farms under the direct control of the state.
This also enabled Stalin to bring the class struggle (fundamental to Bolshevik ideology) to the countryside, as the previous better-off peasants – known as ‘kulaks’ – were pilloried for exploiting the poorer peasants and thus became the subject of intense persecution, including deportation from the village and, in many cases, execution.
In Ukraine, collectivisation led to mass starvation and the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants – a famine known as the ‘Holodomor’ (meaning ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian).
Although the policy also led to famine conditions in other parts of the Soviet Union, “the Ukrainians felt, with some reason, that they were being punished for being Ukrainians, as well as for being peasants,” says Service.
Why did Stalin launch the Great Terror?
The Great Terror (or Great Purge) began in 1936 and ran until 1938. It was a period marked by high profile show trials of the leading cadre of Bolsheviks that had been active during and since the October Revolution. The suspects were accused of conniving with Trotsky to sabotage the Soviet state and murder Stalin.
As Service explains, the Great Terror’s “main purpose was to annihilate any kind of opposition, real or potential”.
Confessions were typically extracted under torture and the guilty were subsequently executed as ‘enemies of the people’ or sentenced to long periods of servitude in labour camps. The wave of terror later spread to the Red Army and members of the intelligentsia – the educated group of Soviet society.
Stalin was a deeply suspicious individual by nature. He was also aware that the violent methods inflicted on the Soviet Union during the first and second Five-Year Plans, had made some of his comrades within the Communist Party deeply uneasy.
In December 1934, one of Stalin’s most loyal comrades in the regime, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated in Leningrad. His murder was blamed on a Trotskyite plot whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Stalin himself.
Some historians have suggested, however, that Kirov’s murder was ordered by Stalin who had come to regard him as a potential rival. Kirov’s demise also provided Stalin with the pretext to point the finger at alleged traitors within the state apparatus.
Convinced that his grip on power was under threat, Stalin moved to purge his erstwhile comrades. The ‘Old Bolsheviks’ like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Kamenev were among the most notable victims of this shocking episode. “He thought that he could replace them with a new young elite that he would train to fulfil the industrial, agricultural, commercial and political tasks of the new Soviet state”, says Service.
Furthermore, Service explains that the Great Terror was a reflection of “the most terrible human pessimism by Stalin, combined with an extreme optimism that you could do this to a country… and come out at the other end of the tunnel with a new state that would be more pliable, more obedient, and would be able to present itself to the rest of the world as offering a vision of the communist future”.
The latter half of the 1930s became “a very gruelling period, a tormenting period in which nearly all the close associates of Lenin were exterminated… Trotsky was the last” – he was assassinated in exile in 1940.
But the Great Terror was not solely reserved for the party’s upper echelons. Wherever you were in the party, you stood a high chance of being arrested and thrown into a labour camp, or shot after being beaten up, tortured and forced to sign a confession.
At its height, an estimated 2.5 million people languished in the Soviet Union’s extensive penal system – the notorious ‘Gulag archipelago’. Gulag is the Russian abbreviation for the Main Administration of Correctional-Labour Camps. This supplied a constant stream of slave labour to the state’s industrial and economic drive.
How many people perished under Stalin’s rule?
The precise number of people who were killed during Stalin’s rule is difficult to ascertain with any precision, but Stalin is acknowledged as one of the most brutal leaders in history.
“It’s in the tens of millions,” says Service. “It’s a staggering number of people, and it’s not just those who were executed or thrown into the Gulag. There are also people who died as a result of the catastrophic effects of the economic and social policies that he unleashed from the end of the 1920s onwards”.
Why did Stalin sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler?
In summer 1939, Stalin shocked communists around the world by signing a non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The years leading up to that point had seen Stalin increasingly perturbed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Nazism, and its overtly anti-Bolshevik agenda, was of acute concern to the Soviet Union’s security.
Stalin had aided and abetted the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), who were fighting a military rebellion backed by Europe’s fascist powers. When it became apparent that the Spanish Republic was doomed, he estimated that his best chance of avoiding trouble with Hitler lay in diverting Hitler’s focus westwards to the capitalist states.
- Read more | Hitler and Stalin’s utopian dreams
A key part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact entailed the two powers invading and dividing Poland between them. Just over two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, triggering the Second World War, the Soviet Union began annexing eastern Poland on 17 September 1939.
As Red Army forces surged into the occupied territory, they began targeting leading Polish intellectuals, army officers and other luminaries. “Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, the secret police, [had] concocted a plan to round them all up,” explains Service.
This led to the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940, during which approximately 22,000 members of the Polish elite and intelligentsia were systematically murdered. The bodies were then dumped in mass graves inside the Katyn forest.
How did the Second World War impact Stalin?
When Hitler ultimately acted on his ideological conviction of attacking the Soviet Union, and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Stalin was stunned.
“He would not take advice in 1941 that Hitler really did mean to launch an invasion,” says Service, “He thought that he was being misled either by Western powers who sought to involve him in their war against Hitler, or there were just saboteurs inside the Soviet Union against the communist leadership. He got it catastrophically wrong”.
After initial paralysis and the loss of vast swathes of territory, the Soviet elite persuaded Stalin to lead the fightback. He was forced to forge an alliance with his sworn capitalist enemies – notably the dogged anti-Bolshevik British prime minister, Winston Churchill.
- Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans
Appeals to Russian nationalism suffused wartime propaganda, while many of the Soviet Union’s great cities – from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to Kyiv and Stalingrad endured staggering hardship at the hands of Nazi aggression.
The Nazis’ discovery of the mass graves within the Katyn forest in April 1943 was used by Hitler to try and drive a wedge between the Allies. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile, and the atrocity was later covered up and blamed on the Nazis themselves (a line that Moscow stuck to until 1990) once the Red Army had wrested back control of the area.
Although the Soviet Union had lost over 27 million lives since 1941 and was among the most battered powers to have fought Nazi Germany, on 9 May 1945, it proclaimed victory over the Third Reich, with much of Eastern and Central Europe now under Stalin’s control.
What role did Stalin play during the Cold War?
The Soviet Union emerged from the war as one of the two new superpowers that would hold sway over the world for the next four decades. Initially, Stalin hoped that the wartime alliance would somehow endure.
According to Service, Stalin anticipated that the Soviet Union “would be allowed to more or less do as it wanted in Eastern Europe without interference from the Western powers, and he hoped that he might get economic assistance from America in the short term, even though he expected there to be trouble with the United States in the longer term”.
However, by the late 1940s, the Marshall Plan – the US aid package designed to revive Europe’s post-war economies – was quickly perceived by Stalin as a threat to the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe.
“From that point on, there was a clash between the US and the USSR [but] both sides wanted to avoid a hot war,” says Service. “Stalin then put his foot down on the throat of all the existing half-freedoms in Eastern Europe and fully communised those countries in a brutal period of trials, arrests and the suppression of rival political parties across half of the European mainland”.
How did Stalin die?
In the early hours of 1 March 1953, Stalin suffered a stroke while staying in one of his dachas (a countryside retreat) in Kuntsevo, west of Moscow. His staff, who were too frightened to disturb him, eventually found Stalin unconscious, lying on the floor.
High-ranking members of the Soviet government such as Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov, flocked to the dacha. “They decided that the best thing to do was not to touch him,” says Service.
The rationale behind this was that, if by some miracle, he recovered, then none of them could have been accused of having held a gun to his head or of having plunged a knife into his back. Despite this, rumours that the dictator was poisoned persist today.
Stalin dwindled over the next few days before succumbing on 5 March 1953, aged 74.
His death triggered a surge of grief within the Soviet Union. “As much as many millions of people hated him, perhaps the same people also somehow thought that something had been pulled out of their lives, too,” explains Service. He was embalmed and displayed alongside Lenin’s preserved body in the mausoleum on Red Square.
In 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the Soviet Communist Party, in which he denounced Stalin’s murderous excesses and cult of personality, led to de-Stalinisation.
Finally, in 1961, Stalin’s remains were removed from the mausoleum and buried in a grave along the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
- Read more | A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends
]]> How Stalin ran rings round the west https://www.historyextra.com/membership/stalin-podcast-giles-milton/ Mon, 01 Jul 2024 06:28:19 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/stalin-podcast-giles-milton/ Giles Milton explores the fractious relationship between the 'Big Three' – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill – during the Second World War The wartime alliance between Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt was arguably the most important of the 20th century – and among the most fraught. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Giles Milton explores a three-way relationship that was plagued by spats, backstabbing and duplicity – yet was absolutely critical to victory over the Nazis.
Giles Milton is the author of The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War (John Murray Press, 2024)
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