The Death of Stalin
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Death of Stalin is by Sheila Fitzpatrick, a pioneer of Soviet history. By homing in on one event, Fitzpatrick manages to pack in an enormous amount of information about the history of the Soviet Union, including how the US approached its Cold War opponent, in less than 100 pages—and that even includes photos. It probably helps to watch the darkly comic Armando Iannucci movie, The Death of Stalin, before reading it, though as Fitzpatrick writes, “not everything about Stalin’s death is comic. It had serious implications for his country and the world in the twentieth century and beyond; this book sets out to unravel them.”
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“It’s part of a series where you take some big event, and look at the consequences that flow from it. That was interesting because, first of all, I like the death scene. We have eyewitness reports about it, which we might get to later. But we also have a recent film by Armando Iannucci called The Death of Stalin, which covers the ground of my second chapter. I found it fun to play off that. Then I have a look at how the death played internally. What are the reactions to it? How did it play externally? What does the West think about it? The chapter that was maybe the most fun to write was about Stalin’s ghost. What are the arguments about the legacy of Stalin and Stalinism? This became a central political issue: how much do we want to keep of Stalinism, and how much do we want to get rid of?” Read more...
The best books on The Soviet Union
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Historian
“This is not the brilliant, funny movie by Armando Iannucci, or the comic book that the movie is based on (La Morte de Staline), even though they share the same title. Rather, it uses the moment of Stalin’s death to tell the story of the Soviet Union, on which Fitzpatrick is a leading historian. Again, you feel yourself in the hands of an expert to tell a story that still has serious implications for the present.” Read more...
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