 At about 4 am on 6 march 1953 broadcasting on the soviet state radio was interrupted by a roll drums. The message was that Stalin had died. Many ordinary citizens could hardly believe their ears. They could not imagine life without Stalin. He had dominated the country, in peace and war, for twenty-six years. A whole generation had grown up knowing no other leader. At school, on the radio and in the work place he had consistently been built up into a god-like figure. It did not seem possible that he was mortal. All over the country the people mourned, even in the labour camps, and they queued to see Stalin's body as it lay in state in Red Square. Hundreds of people were crushed to death when the crowd got out of control. Even when dead, it seemed, the Man of Steel still had the power to kill his people. His body was embalmed and placed beside that of Lenin in the specially constructed mausoleum outside the Kremlin.
Stalin's remains did not rest in peace. Eight years later they were removed from their exalted position because it was considered:
...inappropriate, since the serious violations by Stalin of Lenin's precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honourable Soviet people, and other activities in the period of the personality cult make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of VI Lenin.
The process of destalinization began. The new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the 'personality cult' of Stalin in a secret speech to the Communist Party Congress in 1956. Portraits of the dictator were removed from prominent positions, and before long Soviet historians were permitted to criticize the cruelties and errors of the Stalinist era. Destalinization affected the Soviet satellite states too. In 1956 there were uprisings in Hungary and Poland against communist rule.
However, it was neither a politician nor an historian who portrayed most vividly what the Soviet people had been through. In November 1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had spent eight years in labour camps for allegedly making derogatory remarks about Stalin, published an account of life in the Gulag. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, sold out immediately and became an international best seller. But it was not until the late 1980s, when Soviet President Gorbachev introduced the policy of glasnost (openness), that Western journalists and TV crews were permitted for the first time to speak to Soviet citizens about the Stalinist era.
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