Fifty years ago this week, Russians woke up to reports that their leader, Josef Stalin, had died. For most Russians, it was tragic news. For more than 30 years, they had participated in the myth of the man that Stalin had written: the glorious father figure who called himself “Papa Joe,” the man who had fashioned the Soviet Union into what they thought it should be, an orderly, peaceful nation where everyone had a job.
Russians reveled in the idea of their country as the world’s other superpower and Stalin as the hero who had conquered Hitler. Yet even now, with historians acknowledging that Stalin caused as many as 60 million deaths, some Russians long for a return to “derzhavnost” — the mentality of life in a great fatherland.
Guests:
Mark Kramer, Director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies and a Senior Associate at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University
Yevgenia Albats, an independent Political Analyst and Columnist for the Moscow Times and Novaya Gazeta;David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker