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Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
Kavita Puri on the urgent need to commemorate historical famines
During the Second World War, Deaths related to hunger matched or outnumbered military losses. Famines afflicted regions including the Soviet Union, China, India, Vietnam and Greece. Yet those who perished are rarely remembered in the same way as fallen soldiers. Starvation is not relegated to the past. The latest UN Hunger Hotspots report identifies places of highest concern as Haiti, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Palestine. Sadly, the list of countries where hunger persists is much longer, with violence and conflict the key drivers. Professor Alex de Waal, research professor at Tufts University and a leading expert on famine, explains that part of the reason famines are not remembered and memorialised is that the experience is so painful to recount, and so full of shame, that people want to forget it. In extremis, social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed; a neighbour refuses to give food to a neighbour; forbidden foods are eaten; people sell their bodies to survive; some profit from scarcity. The authorities who engineered a famine, or who neglected the population, have no reason to remember it, either. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" In Ireland, it wasn’t until some 150 years after the start of the Great Famine, which began with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845, that victims were widely memorialised. Around a million people died – from a population of fewer than 9 million – and close to 2 million emigrated in a bid to survive. An expression of remorse by the British government of its role in the famine came only as recently as 1997, though there is still debate about whether the statement issued on behalf of then prime minister Tony Blair constituted an apology. Monuments to the victims and those who fled the country are now dotted around Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain – though none are in London. There are also significant memorials in places to which Irish people emigrated, mostly the US, Canada and Australia. In Ukraine, many millions died during the 1932–33 famine known as the Holodomor (literally ‘death by hunger’), the result of Stalin’s policy of forced agricultural collectivisation. Under the Soviet regime, the subject was taboo; after independence in 1991, though, the famine became central to Ukraine’s nation-building project. There are now Holodomor memorials across Ukraine as well as in the countries in which its diaspora settled, including the US and Canada. Starvation as a weapon of war was not criminalised in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which governed the treatment of combatants and civilians during conflicts. The first step to revise that was an additional protocol introduced in 1977 stating that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”. Just over two decades later, an article in the Rome Statute of the International Court proscribed “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival”, making it a war crime. To date, there have been no successful prosecutions for such acts. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many are turning against prejudice. But we cannot be complacent" The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, developed in 2004, identifies five phases of deprivation, with 5 being the most extreme, designated ‘Famine/Humanitarian Catastrophe’. The UN has voted that action is mandated only at Phase 5 – when families are at or beyond breaking point, when taboos have already been violated to find food, when widespread malnutrition has set in and mortality rates are high. Critics say that point is far too late. Memorials to famines are, de Waal says, exceptions to the rule, yet he believes that there is a connection between remembering famines and preventing them. In this 80th anniversary year of the end of the Second World War, as we commemorate those who fought and died in the conflict, we could start by remembering those millions who also perished through starvation. This column was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
How Queen Victoria's aunt broke free of an abusive marriage
Helen Rappaport speaks to Danny Bird about the tumultuous life of the German princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who escaped her abusive marriage to the tsar’s brother.
Danny Bird: What drew you to explore the life of Princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld? Helen Rappaport: She was a difficult subject because she’s so lost to history. I discovered her story while researching the siblings of Queen Victoria’s mother Victoria (or Victoire), Duchess of Kent. Victoire was a younger sister of Juliane, known as Julie, who was born in 1781. I found it fascinating that the obscure and impoverished German duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld produced so many children who made strategically significant marriages. Julie’s better-known siblings were Leopold, King of the Belgians, whose first marriage was to Princess Charlotte of Wales; and Victoire, who married the Duke of Kent. In 1796, Julie made an impressive marriage to Grand Duke Konstantin, the brother of the future Tsar Alexander I. If the couple had not divorced, Julie would have become empress on Alexander’s death in 1825 – yet she has been almost completely overlooked by history. Why did this family play such a major role in reshaping post-Napoleonic Europe? What distinguished the clan was their ambitious matriarch, Augusta. People often talk about Queen Victoria’s prowess as a matchmaker, but her grandmother Augusta was the precursor. Wedded to the impoverished Francis, heir to the Duchy of of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, she faced a dire situation: the family coffers were empty. To address this, she set about strategically marrying off her children to dukes, princes and princesses to secure their futures and the family’s standing. And her efforts began with Julie. In 1795, Catherine the Great of Russia sought a bride for her second grandson, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich. German princesses were especially favoured, and Catherine’s emissary, Baron Budberg, came to Coburg. At the time, this was the capital of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld – one of the Thuringian states – though today it is a relatively modest town in northern Bavaria. There, Baron Budberg encountered Augusta’s three young daughters, and reported back that one of these might be a suitable candidate to marry Catherine’s grandson. Catherine invited Augusta to bring her charming daughters to St Petersburg for inspection – entailing a gruelling 40-day journey by carriage. For Julie and her sisters, emerging from provincial Coburg into the grandeur of the Russian capital must have been an extraordinary experience. What were her experiences of life at the Russian court? That’s incredibly hard to grasp. Julie was just 14 in 1795, when she was taken to Russia to marry a grand duke. She didn’t know the Russian language, she had no friends there and, once she’d been selected, her mother took the coach back home with her two sisters, leaving Julie completely isolated and frightened. Thankfully her sister-in-law, Louise of Baden (known in Russia as Elisaveta), consort of the future Tsar Alexander I, took Julie under her wing. Even so, it was a bewildering experience. To marry Konstantin, she had to convert to Russian Orthodoxy from Lutheranism. Upon arrival, she underwent complex instruction in Old Church Slavonic rituals and endured a daunting conversion ceremony at the Winter Palace, taking the name Anna Feodorovna. Imagine a 14-year-old girl facing the grandeur and arcane rituals of that enormous palace, surrounded by priests, incense and formality. She had no time to prepare for any of it. She arrived in Russia in the depths of winter, and in February 1796 – after just a few months in St Petersburg – she was married. Her life during the marriage was isolated. She often sat through monotonous evenings with Catherine the Great, playing card games and being bored to tears. After Catherine’s death in November 1796, she was left alone much of the time because Konstantin was a career soldier and spent most of his time with his troops or away on campaign. What was her marriage like? We don’t fully know the extent of the abuse Julie endured, because she spoke very little about it. What we do know comes from numerous witness accounts of Konstantin’s cruelty and terrible behaviour. Her mother hinted in letters that he infected Julie with a venereal disease; this seems likely, and certainly she sought treatment. Julie never fully confided in her parents, because she knew that the prosperity of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld relied on her regularly sending money home. Indeed, her father often pressured her to provide financial support. Konstantin’s brutality extended to his soldiers, and he displayed behaviour that suggests sadistic or psychopathic tendencies. According to his Swiss tutor, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, Konstantin struggled with attention and concentration, was highly restless and an uncontrollable pupil. Even Catherine the Great acknowledged her grandson’s behavioural issues, at one point placing him under house arrest. The abuse that Julie faced was shocking. For example, knowing that she was afraid of mice, Konstantin once locked her in a room and had servants open a cage full of the animals – leaving her screaming in terror. Such actions are far from normal behaviour, and other instances of his cruelty are detailed in the book. However, though Konstantin had a deeply disturbed and disturbing personality, there were also moments of kindness and gentleness. He later remarried, and reportedly had a happy marriage with his second wife. However, it seems unlikely that Julie ever experienced this softer side of him. Julie determined to escape her marriage. How did her quest for autonomy compare with that of other noble women of the time? It was extraordinary! How many women dared to escape a marriage twice, especially during that period – and a marriage to a Russian grand duke, at that? I can’t think of any other young brides who didn’t just grin and bear it – or ‘lie back and think of England’, so to speak. Many women of that period were married off into dreadful dynastic unions, often desperately unhappy, with no choice but to put up with it. Julie was different: strong-willed and determined. Konstantin made her life miserable within months of their marriage, and in 1799 she pleaded to visit her sick mother in Coburg, eyeing an escape. Konstantin was away campaigning in Italy, so Tsar Paul I [son of Catherine the Great] allowed her to go. However, she was commanded to return later that year. Even her own family insisted that she go back to Russia, for the sake of their honour. They feared losing the financial support they received from the Romanovs if she didn’t return. Heartbroken, she complied, and endured more years of unhappiness until Paul’s murder in 1801. After that, Julie appealed to her brother-in-law, Alexander Pavlovich, who had become Tsar Alexander I. He granted her permission to leave – on condition that she lived quietly in Coburg. She complied, albeit briefly, before moving to Switzerland. Did her broken marriage cause a scandal? There were rumblings at the Russian court, and some suggested – well, I think it’s likely – that she was having an affair by the time she left. The evidence is thin, but her misery was palpable, and Konstantin had countless mistresses. Rumours of a lover persisted, but definitive proof has been elusive. When she did leave Russia, it was very, very quietly. She simply climbed into a carriage with a couple of ladies-in-waiting, and departed. In any case, the Russian people had little knowledge of Julie. During her time there she had been confined to the Winter Palace, the Marble Palace or sometimes – worst of all – the great palace at Gatchina, 28 miles south-west of St Petersburg, where she had endured the harsh, militaristic regime of Tsar Paul. What can you tell us about the world in which Julie lived? Julie grew up during a tumultuous period in Europe, marked by the aftershocks of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. Her family held the ducal rights to Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and were directly impacted by the Napoleonic Wars. During the conflict, they retreated to their modest residence in Saalfeld, about 30 miles northeast of Coburg – where, in 1806, a major battle unfolded in the valley below. So Julie was acutely aware of the turmoil of the era. Julie maintained a close relationship with Alexander, who had permitted her to escape her marriage to Konstantin. The tsar travelled a great deal in Europe during the Napoleonic Wars – for meetings, inspection of troops and so on, and also to visit his sister Maria Pavlovna, Duchess of Mecklenburg, in Weimar – which resulted in occasional further meetings with Julie. After several years travelling around Europe, Julie finally settled in Switzerland in 1814. She found a quiet home near Bern, at the moment when the contentious issue of Swiss independence was resolved at the Congress of Vienna. Even so, an ongoing struggle in Vaud – the Swiss canton west of Bern – between German-speaking Lutherans and French-speaking Catholics at times posed a threat to her estate. She also witnessed how the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe affected her friends, such as the king and queen of Prussia, who had to flee to safety during the wars. Julie kept herself apart from the political intrigues of Europe, though, even as she remained aware of the dramatic changes happening around her. You refer to Julie as “an unjustifiably neglected footnote in history”. To what extent was that obscurity of her own making? That’s a very interesting point. She left Russia under difficult circumstances, fleeing a deeply unhappy marriage marked by psychological and physical abuse. As a result, she avoided attracting attention to herself. Given the social norms of the time, her situation was especially precarious as a Russian grand duchess who had left her husband. She lived in limbo for 20 years, unable to obtain a divorce. In such a situation, most women of her status would have been social pariahs. However, her exceptional personality and tragic circumstances transcended the judgmental attitudes of the time. Despite her self-imposed isolation, she maintained friendships and connections. Nevertheless, she did lead a solitary life, although occasionally paid visits to royal relatives. Her obscurity was largely self-imposed, and her letters reveal a deep fear of scandal and social rejection. This fear prompted her to withdraw from public life. She was the active wife of a Russian grand duke for only about five years; consequently, history barely noticed her. Julie’s most renowned relative was her niece Queen Victoria. What was their relationship like? I love Victoria but, in many cases, she created a fantasy vision of the people in her life, including Julie. Victoria didn’t know her aunt particularly well, though she knew the basics of her tragic story, and had seen her portraits. In fact, Victoria commissioned the last portrait of Julie, painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter in 1848 as a gift for the queen’s mother, Victoire. I gather that the painting is now at Highgrove, in the possession of King Charles III. Victoria had met Julie’s mother, Augusta, when the latter visited Britain to inspect her granddaughter, affectionately calling the young princess a “pretty little May blossom”. However, Victoria didn’t meet Julie herself until much later, during a visit to her uncle King Leopold’s palace at Laeken in 1843. Victoria had been eager to meet Julie long before then. When she ascended the throne in 1837, she wanted Julie to come to her coronation. Later, she also wished Julie to attend her wedding to Albert in 1840. Being rather reserved, Julie generally avoided public displays and large gatherings of royal relatives, and declined both invitations. After finally meeting Julie, Victoria was captivated by her and spoke lyrically about her “lovely Auntie Julie”. She became even more sentimental when Albert took her to Rosenau Palace, his birthplace and boyhood home, which Julie and her mother often visited. Perhaps because of that admiration, Victoria had an idealised image of Julie, and was unaware of the full truth of her life, much of it having been kept from her. Prince Albert – who was also Julie’s nephew – had a closer connection with her. Together with his older brother Ernst, he visited Julie at her home in autumn 1837. Albert was very taken with Julie, and made two more visits later that year. How did you piece together Julie’s life? Writing this book proved a significant challenge, primarily because it required me to step outside my usual historical period. My expertise largely covers the reign of Queen Victoria and the following decades, with a particular focus on late imperial Russia and the revolution. So the biggest hurdle was navigating the history and culture of Napoleonic Europe. Compounding this was the language barrier. Much of my work investigating Julie’s story involved studying German sources, including correspondence and material from the Staatsarchiv (State Archive) of Coburg. Many of these documents were written in Kurrentschrift, an intricately cursive and challenging old German script that I can’t read. Though I have basic German, this was beyond me. I enlisted experts to help with the German documents. In Germany, Josef Dreesen retrieved materials from the Staatsarchiv, which has a notoriously complex cataloguing system. In the UK, Oliver Walton, an expert in historical manuscripts, translated letters. His expertise, honed on work such as curating Prince Albert’s papers for the Royal Archives digitisation project, was invaluable. Thankfully, the Russian aristocracy – indeed, much of the Europe- an aristocracy at the time – used French as their primary written language. Many crucial letters – including those from Julie’s close friend Elisaveta – were in French, so were far more accessible. What do you hope that readers will gain from reading about Julie’s life? I hope readers find Julie’s story as moving, interesting and unconventional as I did. It’s always a joy to restore someone overlooked, forgotten or under-represented to history. I spent more than 20 years chasing down the story of Mary Seacole before I wrote about it, and other subjects have proved just as elusive. I also hope that the book offers a fresh perspective on the history of Saxe-Coburg and Russia during that era. And I hope especially that readers grasp just how brutally ruthless the European marriage market was for young aristocratic women. Being married off to a Russian grand duke or future tsar was far from glamorous – rather, it could be absolutely terrifying, as Julie’s experience shows. Helen Rappaport is a historian and author. She is the author of This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
My history hero: James Coomarasamy chooses Andrei Sakharov (1921–89)
BBC broadcaster James Coomarasamy chooses Andrei Sakharov as a history hero
In profile Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and, later, dissident awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for championing human rights around the world. After playing a major part in the development of a Soviet hydrogen bomb, he grew concerned about the moral and political implications of his work. In 1980, he was arrested and exiled by Soviet authorities, and later became prominent in political opposition in the USSR. When did you first hear about Sakharov? While I was studying Russian at university in the late 1980s. I spent half a year in Moscow during the Gorbachev era – in fact, I was in the USSR when Sakharov was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s first serious experiment with parliamentary democracy. What kind of man was he? He was a brilliant scientist from an intellectual family. He tried to join the Red Army during the Second World War but failed his medical. He then became involved in the Soviet project to design an atomic bomb – he’s been dubbed ‘The father of the hydrogen bomb’. By the 1960s, though, he’d come to the view that the development of nuclear weapons had created the potential for worldwide destruction, and that the lack of individual freedoms in the Soviet Union also posed a danger to global peace. Read more | How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world What made him a hero? Sakharov used his position as a member of the Soviet elite to try to change the system from within, and used his platform to urge Khrushchev and Brezhnev to stop testing nuclear weapons, protect human rights and find ways to peacefully co-exist with the west. Speaking out came at great personal cost: by the 1970s, he was regarded as a dissident and traitor. He was prevented from collecting his Nobel Peace Prize, and was later arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky. Read more | The history of the Nobel Prizes Eventually, though, the courage he displayed paid off. Gorbachev, who was clearly influenced by Sakharov, came to understand the need for more democracy and for co-existence between the two great power blocs. Sadly, things have moved backwards in Russia in recent years. What was his finest hour? Probably his initial decision to stand up against a totalitarian system that had lauded him – and to accept the consequences. All of his later influence at home and abroad stemmed from that decision and from the far-sighted views – linking individual rights with global security – which he developed in the 1960s and which remain relevant in Russia today. Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about him? No. He led an unblemished private life. His first wife died and his second, Yelena Bonner, was his soulmate in the struggle for freedom; he even went on hunger strike to persuade authorities to allow her to travel abroad for medical treatment. What would you ask Sakharov if you could meet him? I’d love to know what he made of east–west relations today, and of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I’d also ask if he had any advice for those Russians who want their country to pursue a different path. Jamie Coomarasamy is a BBC broadcaster, presenting The World Tonight and Newshour, and was talking to York Membery. This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Did Catherine the Great really have sex with a horse?
It is well overdue that this particular rumour about Russian empress Catherine the Great is sent to the glue factory
More than 200 years after Catherine the Great’s death in 1796 – from a stroke, not bestiality – this ludicrous lie still tends to be the first thing people say about the long-serving Russian empress. In fact, Catherine simply received similar treatment to other powerful women throughout history who have dared to have a sex life. To this pernicious yet enduring myth, we must say an unequivocal: no. Or should that be neigh? Did Catherine the Great really have sex with a horse? No, Catherine the Great did not meet an outrageously lurid death during an attempt at bestiality. No, she had not rigged up a harness-and-pulley system to hold up a horse up so that she could lie down underneath and force the animal to have sex with her. And no, the harness did not break, resulting in her being crushed by the falling stallion. Why was Catherine the Great rumoured to have had sex with a horse? Today, the Empress of Russia (r1762–96) is widely celebrated for modernising the country and establishing the empire as a global player. She patronised the arts, sciences and literature; encouraged educational reform based on Enlightenment principles; and expanded Russian territory with the annexation of the Crimea and partition of the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But from the earliest days of her 34-year reign, Catherine fell victim to numerous rumours spread by her enemies, in the imperial court and beyond. Many of her nobles clung to their resentment over how she had come to the throne, and the fact that she was not Russian at all. Read more | Is Catherine the Great's reputation justified? She had been born a Prussian princess named Sophie (she adopted the name Catherine after converting to Russian Orthodox Christianity), who was married off as a teenager to the future tsar. To say the marriage was a failure would be an understatement: just six months into her husband Peter III’s reign, she overthrew him in a coup backed by the army. Then, when Peter died while in captivity eight days later, the blame – rightly or wrongly, it remains unclear – fell squarely on Catherine. During her reign, her enemies criticised the empress for being too influenced by the west in her outlook, particularly when it came to the ideals of the French Enlightenment, and for having favourites at court. In fact, the latter inspired the main subject for scurrilous attacks against Catherine: her sex life. Was Catherine the Great a nymphomaniac? Painted as a nymphomaniac with an insatiable desire for young men, it was said that Catherine the Great took dozens of lovers and showered them with gifts and privileges – even making one of them, Stanisław August Poniatowski, the king of Poland. Another claim was that she had a room filled with erotic furniture, including tables with penises for legs and topped with breasts; something that has not been confirmed. Read more | From whipping horses to royal love chairs: the lewd yet luxurious history of high-end erotic furniture History has shown that rumours about many powerful women have tended to focus on promiscuity or deviancy. Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn, the list of notable women criticised for their sexual behaviour goes on. Catherine did have an active sex life, but misogyny undoubtedly fuelled the attacks on her. These were not just quietly spoken rumours from Russian nobles either, but repeated and erroneous claims made in newspapers around Europe. One British cartoon, titled An Imperial Stride!, depicted Catherine straddling Russian and Constantinople with a line of rulers underneath looking up her skirt and saying things like, “What a prodigious expansion!” and “The whole Turkish army wouldn’t satisfy her”. How did Catherine the Great really die? The horse-based story about Catherine’s demise was especially graphic, however, and especially untrue. In reality, the history is devoid of salaciousness. Catherine suffered a stroke while in her washroom, fell into a coma and died the next day at the age of 67.
Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?
The hammer and sickle is one of the modern world’s most recognisable symbols. It instantly evokes the former Soviet Union and communism. For some people around the globe, it remains a beacon of hope for a better tomorrow. But for others it is a painful reminder of totalitarian oppression and terror. What’s the history behind this revolutionary symbol?
What is the hammer and sickle? The symbol of the hammer and sickle is typically presented in a two-dimensional format, with the hammer crossed over the curved blade of the sickle (a tool traditionally used for harvesting crops, which has a curved metal blade often set on top of a wooden handle). A red star often – though not always – appears just above the tip of the sickle. The hammer represents the working class engaged in industrial production, who, according to Marxist theory, are destined to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the dominant social class under capitalism. The sickle denotes the peasantry, the toilers of the land. Though the symbol denotes solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers, the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx, whose works were foundational to the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, had dismissed the peasantry as a vestige, leftover by the epoch that had preceded capitalism: feudalism. Marx regarded peasants as an instinctively conservative class that would likely prove hostile to a workers’ revolution. The adoption of a visual expression of unity between worker and peasant shows the Bolsheviks’ adaption of Marxism to their homeland’s specific circumstances, referencing the socio-economic reality of Russia, which was still a predominantly agrarian society with little industrial development, at the time of the October Revolution in 1917. When did the hammer and sickle first appear? In early 1918, Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky – head of the regime’s Commissariat for Education (known as ‘Narkompros’) – launched a competition for artists and designers to create an official seal for the nascent Soviet state. The entries were a diverse assortment that spanned everything from striking avant-garde forms, classical imagery such as overflowing cornucopias, and even a double-headed eagle shorn of its feathers and regalia (the double-headed eagle had been adopted centuries before by the Russian tsars to symbolise their link to ancient Rome via the Byzantine empire; the regal title ‘tsar’ meaning ‘Caesar’). Read more | The last days of the Romanovs: could George V have saved the family? The winning entry (by an unknown artist, though it has sometimes been attributed to one Alexander Nikolaevich Leo) featured a crossed hammer and sickle, sheaves of wheat, a rising sun and a vertical sword. However, this was just weeks after Soviet Russia had negotiated its withdrawal from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin, determined to maintain the regime’s peace-making credentials, vetoed the inclusion of a sword in April 1918. While the government debated the state seal, artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin created the template of a crossed hammer and sickle that would later become famous throughout the world. Read more | Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower Kamzolkin’s stark design was originally produced for a poster celebrating 1918’s May Day festivities in Moscow’s Zamoskvorechye district. On 10 July 1918, the Soviet republic formally adopted its constitution, which officially proclaimed that: “the coat of arms of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic consists of a red background on which a golden sickle and a hammer are placed (crosswise, handles downward) in sun-rays and surrounded by a wreath.” Beneath this design was a slogan in Russian Cyrillic that paraphrased the last sentence of The Communist Manifesto and affirmed the Bolsheviks’ commitment to a global socialist revolution: “Workers of the world, unite!” What other symbols did the Bolsheviks use? Among the rejected entries for the state seal was an illustration by graphic artist Sergey Chekhonin, of a peasant woman holding a sickle and spade, facing a male worker holding a sledgehammer and a caduceus. These gender roles – the countryside as feminine and nurturing and the city as masculine and assertive, endured in Soviet inconography. Some of these symbols also showed links to the classical pantheon. The caduceus is a staff wielded by the Greek god Hermes (also the Roman god Mercury). As well as a divine messenger, Hermes was the patron of commerce. His caduceus and other paraphernalia, such as his winged helmet, often appeared on the banners of trade unions across Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Also, the sickle is associated with Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture. Lenin and his comrades understood the power of symbols and revolutionary heraldry. Further classical imagery appeared on the frontispiece to the first Soviet constitution, which featured fasces (a bundle of wooden rods with an axe) behind the hammer and sickle. Fasces exemplified authority in ancient Rome and were revived during the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century. How is the hammer and sickle used today? Just over a year after the October Revolution, leading Bolsheviks formed the Communist International, better known as the ‘Comintern’. This global body aimed to promote the cause of worldwide proletarian revolution through kindred communist parties in every nation on the planet. The hammer and sickle quickly became the symbol for world communism. It adorned the Soviet flag until the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, undergoing slight modifications to its design over the decades. To this day it remains the symbol of many communist parties, including governing ones in the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam. On the podcast | Professor Lea Ypi reflects on living through the fall of communism in Albania Across present-day Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, the symbol remains ubiquitous on buildings and monuments. Aeroflot, Russia’s de facto national airline, has retained the winged hammer and sickle logo designed by artist Alexander Rodchenko. Is the hammer and sickle used in former Soviet states? In 2010, several states in eastern Europe that had once been within Moscow’s orbit called upon the European Union to ban the hammer and sickle as a symbol of totalitarianism and crimes against humanity. This was ultimately unsuccessful and was left up to the respective member states to determine their own approach. Following the escalation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has moved to obliterate traces of the country’s Soviet past. In August 2023, the Soviet coat of arms on the shield of the Mother Ukraine statue was replaced with the country’s tryzub (‘trident’) emblem. How else has the hammer and sickle been used? Given its striking imagery, the hammer and sickle has also found an audience beyond its explicitly political context. During a holiday to Italy, pop artist Andy Warhol was inspired to create a series featuring the tools in 1976 after being confronted with ubiquitous graffiti of the symbol while touring Italian towns. George Orwell’s 1945 fable of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, in which animals revolt against their human farmer, features the so-called ‘Hoof and Horn’ flag in an apparent parody of the Soviet banner. By coincidence, and in a non-communist rendering, the Republic of Austria’s coat of arms consists of an eagle grasping a hammer and sickle in its claws. What symbols did the Bolsheviks use prior to the hammer and sickle? Before the hammer and sickle there was another Bolshevik emblem – the plough and hammer, set within a red star. As the American journalist John Reed conveyed in the title of his eyewitness account of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in autumn 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World, the October Revolution was a seismic event. As the ancient double-headed eagle of Russia’s tsarist past came crashing down amid the aftershocks, the country’s radical new leaders turned to face the future. Unlike its European neighbours, Russia had retained an autocratic monarchy into the 20th century. Having only abolished serfdom in 1861, the vast empire was still largely defined by a feudal social order where illiterate peasants made up most of the population. Generations of them had been raised to revere religious icons and the tsar as a ‘little father’ to his people, a living intercessor between their everyday lives and the divine. The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware of the authority that visual motifs and symbols commanded in the land. They set about cultivating a new revolutionary culture soon after the October Revolution. Tsarist flags and iconography were outlawed, while statues of emperors were toppled on a wave of iconoclasm that swept through the major cities. Yet before the hammer and sickle emerged, the new regime’s earliest symbol arose amid the Russian Civil War that immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Read more | Russia's Civil War: why the 1917 uprisings descended into disaster On 19 April 1918, soldiers of Soviet Russia’s Red Army were bestowed with a breast badge that depicted a plough crossed over a hammer, contained within a red star. Although its designer remains a mystery, the plough’s association with agriculture functioned as a precursor to the sickle, symbolising the peasantry in union with the industrial working class, embodied in the hammer. As for the red star, its origins as a socialist symbol are also unclear. Five-pointed red stars had first appeared on the uniforms of tsarist officers during the early 19th century. Its martial use was a nod to the Roman god of war, Mars. Similarly, its adoption by the Red Army evoked this meaning. However, it may also have been a salute to the 1908 novel, Red Star by Russian writer, Alexander Bogdanov, a work of science fiction that imagined a communist utopia on the red planet, Mars. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now Why is red associated with communism? The Bolsheviks considered themselves the heirs to the European revolutionary tradition. To that end, in 1918, they adopted the red flag and renamed themselves the Communist Party as a homage to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Prior to that brief insurrection – which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had highlighted as a glimpse of the workers’ revolution they envisioned – the red flag had been adopted by radical republicans on the left during the 1848 revolution in France. The use of red by the Soviet state also tapped into centuries of Russian tradition. In the Russian language, krasnyi (‘red’) is related to the word krasivyi, meaning ‘beautiful’. Red corners were (and remain to this day) features of Orthodox Christian homes where residents displayed their holy icons. Similarly, Moscow’s Red Square became the focal point for all national celebrations in the decades that followed the October Revolution.
Josef Stalin: the paranoid dictator who forged the Soviet Union into a superpower
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
Operation Bagration 1944: the perfect victory on the Eastern Front
Iain MacGregor tells the story of the Operation Bagration, a large-scale Soviet offensive against Nazi Germany launched in support of the Normandy Landings...
The 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy – D-Day, on 6 June 1944 – was commemorated earlier this month. It was an epic operation in men, machines, and planning. But the beginning of the great assault on Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ was not just a military success, it had been one supported with subterfuge on a grand scale. To confuse German military intelligence, fake armies, radio communications and orders of battle were created to convince Hitler that the allies were planning to cross the English Channel to attack the Pas-de-Calais. Operation ‘Fortitude’ would deceive and force him to divert precious German units guarding Normandy prior to D-Day. While all eyes were on the battle in France, another bigger assault on the Third Reich began, just over two weeks after D-Day. It was the offensive Joseph Stalin had promised to Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt at the Tehran Conference in 1943; a spectacular assault on the eastern front that would destroy all hopes Hitler had of keeping the Red Army at bay in 1944. The so-called Operation Bagration would see the Red Army race across eastern Europe. Within a matter of weeks, Soviet tanks were positioned outside the gates of Warsaw. Historically, it was a pivotal moment in the Second World War that all but guaranteed Nazi defeat in the ruins of Berlin ten months later. The build up Since Adolf Hitler’s gamble to launch the greatest land invasion in history on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), the fighting on the eastern front had been brutal – almost a war of extermination. Hitler’s grand plans of conquest had been stopped by the Russian winter and the limitless supply of fresh Soviet troops that would replace each titanic defeat the Germans enjoyed in the first year of the war. Though several million Red Army troops had been killed or captured – and millions more civilians killed or imprisoned under German occupation – by the summer of 1944, the tide had turned in Joseph Stalin’s favour. Read more | The battle of Stalingrad: a German officer's account of WW2's bloodiest battle The cataclysmic Axis surrender at Stalingrad in southern Russia in early 1943 had been followed almost five months later by a second defeat at the great tank battle of Kursk. The Soviet counter offensive after their victory at Kursk drove the German Wehrmacht back several hundred kilometres over the following months. All along the 1,500-mile eastern front, Germany and her allies had attempted to stabilise their positions: Army Group North had protected the path towards the Baltic states and eastern Prussia; Army Group Centre, the biggest formation numbering over several hundred thousand men, had been set up to guard Belarus against any threat into central Europe; but it was Army Group South that had suffered the biggest reverse, driven further back into Ukraine, and thus leaving a salient which the advancing Soviet assault occupied. Strategically, the Wehrmacht expected the summer offensive would come from the south, where they were weakest and thus sent what spare divisions it could, including armour, to beef up its defences. Army Group Centre, commanded by Field Marshal Ernst Busch, defending a geographical 600-mile-long line above it, was thought to be secure behind extensive fortifications and in-depth minefields. The Soviet military command (Stavka), however, ignored such logic, and instead pinpointed this formation for attack and the destruction of the four German formations occupying it: the 3rd Panzer Army, the 2nd, 4th and 9th armies. Read more | How to win a 20th century battle By the summer of 1944, the Red Army had perfected the art of strategic deception, or maskirovka. It had proved highly successful at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 (Operation Uranus) and was enhanced at the battle of Kursk in 1943. In both cases, the Soviets had hidden the build-up of fresh armies and armoured divisions, as well as vast lines of defences to trap advancing German columns. It had inflicted devastating losses on Hitler’s forces and tipped the balance in the east. Ahead of Operation Bagration, General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German army intelligence in the east, had analysed what he thought was in front of Army Group Centre that summer and reassured them the main thrust of the Red Army would come from the south in Ukraine. Just as the Germans had fallen for the allied ruse to attack the Pas-de-Calais to begin the landings in France, the Soviets duped Gehlen into believing further offensives would be conducted from Ukraine. The salient the Soviets occupied was instead a perfect launch pad, and the topography of the flat terrain enabled mobile armies to move at speed. The Red Army was also, by now, virtually motorised, thanks to American Lend Lease supplies of trucks, jeeps, and tanks. It was the Germans who resembled the horse-drawn columns of the First World War – although what they lacked in vehicles and tanks, they made up for with professionalism. The Red Army was still ostensibly a militia force, with the bulk of their troops learning the art of war on the job (hence the continuing heavy losses). Across the whole of the conflict, the Red Army would be rebuilt five times over. General Gehlen held the view that any major offensive would come from the south, with the weight of German armour and aircraft allocated to this sector. Hitler had dismissed Field Marshal Busch’s requests for his units to withdraw back to the Dnieper River, to shorten their lines, deny the Soviets the salient in the south, and offer more strength in depth. Hitler’s confidence to remain lay in Army Group Centre’s formidable layers of defences it had constructed and the rigidity of his tactics in not giving up any ground to the enemy. He pointed to its southern flank right, protected he believed, by the swampy wooded Pripyat Marshes, where mobile warfare would be difficult. Any threat towards Army Group Centre was therefore judged to be a feint to mask the real campaign from the direction of Ukraine. Preparation and deception To reinforce German opinion, every effort was made by Soviet forces to make it appear as if the southern front was indeed the main point of attack. In Belarus, Red Army units could be seen by German observers digging trenches and constructing fortifications along their front. The Stavka had imposed complete radio silence with Soviet radio stations close to the frontline shut down. As the allies had done with Operation Fortitude, in the Baltic to the north, and in southern Russia, the Red Army built entire dummy armies of fake tanks and artillery parks. Despite Soviet air superiority German air reconnaissance managed to gain entry to their aerospace and photograph the fake forces. It was part of the plan, as Soviet anti-aircraft units fired live rounds to convince the German pilots what they could detect was real. It worked. Hitler ordered fresh armour and infantry formations north and south to shore up potential threatened positions, further weakening Army Group Centre’s resources. Over one hundred thousand troops, one third of its artillery and more than three quarters of its armour was now moved to the south. Of the 4,740 tanks and assault guns situated along the eastern front, only 533 were left with Army Group Centre, approximately eleven percent of the total. It would be a fateful decision. Take the quiz | WW2 history quiz: how much do you know? Deception was one success; internal security was another. From the top-down, information as to the summer offensive was watertight. Stalin intrusted just four commanders with the plans in full: Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the chief of staff Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, his deputy General Alexei Antonov, and the chief of operations General Konstantin Rokossovsky. Each was forbidden to discuss the coming operation by telegram, telephone, or simple correspondence. Stalin stipulated no date be confirmed for the offensive with senior staff invited in small groups to headquarters for briefings; all were on a need-to-know basis for their respective areas. Very few knew the bigger goal – to annihilate Army Group Centre as quickly as possible, break the eastern front wide open and pour into central Europe. Four army groups were designated for the operation: 1st, 2nd and 3rd Byelorussian Fronts and the 1st Baltic Front (their strength equivalent to a western army group). As they had perfected at Stalingrad and then Kursk, under cover of darkness, and in great secrecy, hundreds of thousands of men, a million tonnes of supplies and three-hundred-thousand tonnes of oil were moved into place. The vast lines of railway wagons taking men and machinery to their assembly areas, were taken by drivers who had no idea what their destination was. Any passengers who had ideas to get out of their carriages when the trains had periodical stops were quickly placed under arrest by Red Army military police guarding every station. To the south of Army Group Centre were the vast swamps of the Pripyat Marshes. The German intelligence had concluded these marshes were impenetrable to vehicles, but Soviet engineers set about constructing platforms and wooden causeways for their armour to navigate onto dry land. The sudden appearance of T-34 tanks out of this watery wilderness, like German panzers sweeping out of the Ardennes Forest in 1940, would be a critical feature of the battle to come in terms of breaking the enemy’s morale and willingness to fight. The battle begins By early June the offensive had been codenamed ‘Bagration’, in honour of the Georgian General Pyotr Bagration. He had died a hero defending Moscow against Napoleon at the battle of Borodino in 1812. The eventual start date, just over two weeks after the allied landings on the Normandy coastline, was laced with historical symbolism. It would be three years to the day that Hitler had first launched his surprise attack against the people of the Soviet Union to start the war. Many millions of men, women, the elderly, and children had died up until this point. Thousands of their cities, towns and villages had been reduced to rubble, their centres of culture reduced to ashes, and their way of life wiped away. Operation Bagration would repay all that had gone before. Army Group Centre – comprising of 849,000 men in 38 divisions (of which only 482,000 were combat formations) – were about to be struck by a juggernaut of steel. Four army groups: two led by Zhukov and two by Vassilevsky, whose combined strength broke down to 118 rifle divisions, eight tank and mechanised corps, six Cossack cavalry divisions, 13 artillery divisions, and 14 air defence divisions. Read more | Why did WW2 happen? Their 1.7 million men under arms was roughly double that of Army Group Centre. Crucially, Soviet armour and artillery would overwhelm German defnces. The combined strength of Soviet armoured units contained 2,715 tanks and 1,355 assault guns, giving them a ratio advantage of six to one. Soviet tank crews had the added firepower of the longer ranged T-34/85 as well as taking delivery of Lend Lease M4 Sherman tanks. The Soviets had built up their artillery parks, which now fielded 10,563 pieces, 2,306 rocket launchers, and 4,230 anti-tank guns. Overwhelming Soviet air forces would clear the skies above the battlefield, with their squadrons enjoying a seven to one numerical advantage over the Luftwaffe. On the eve of the offensive, Red Army sapper units, including T-34 tanks with anti-mine clearing attachments, sweeped away lanes within the layers of German minefields, allowing shock troops to infiltrate and eliminate enemy lookouts in their forward observation posts. Meanwhile, and mirroring the French resistance in Normandy, Soviet partisans destroyed the German rail network behind their lines while, from the air, waves of Soviet bombers appeared along the front to decimate enemy bases, communication centres, and supply dumps. Then the Soviet artillery and regiments of Katyusha rockets opened all along the frontline, tearing great holes in the German defences. The survivors, that were determined to defend their positions, soon heard the familiar clanking of Russian tank tracks as a tidal wave of armour now struck. All Soviet forces were under the directive to maintain momentum of the advance. Using the German tactics of strike and mobility against them, Red Army columns would engage, whilst others sped round the flanks of German pockets of resistance, to envelope and destroy. They would employ for the first time a new tactic known as the ‘rolling double-barrage.’ Where German forward and rear defensive positions would be simultaneously suppressed by artillery and air strikes to suppress what anti-tank defences remained intact. A more daunting tactic now employed for the first time by Soviet mechanised units was deep penetration into the enemy’s rearmost positions. Bagration would not be a classic frontal offensive whose momentum would be blunted by German counterattacks. This time, they would not let the enemy pause for breath. They would simply overrun and outgun him. From retreat to rout To add to the confusion of many desperate German frontline commanders contending with the sudden breakthroughs all along their lines, to the south, emerging from the Pripyat Marshes was Marshal Rokossovsky’s first Belorussian Front. What was once a retreat soon turned into a rout. Such was the destruction of rear echelon units and communications centres that German units now fought for their survival rather than in a coordinated front. Troops trains carrying the wounded to the west were overtaken and destroyed by Soviet tank formations. Soviet ground-attack aircraft roamed at will over the disintegrating front to pick off fleeing enemy units or those trying to make a stand. Field Marshal Busch’s attempts to persuade Hitler to allow a coordinated retreat ended in his sacking on the 28 June to be replaced by Field Marshal Model. A commander willing to not only obey the Fuhrer, but even outshine him in the failed doctrine of fight to the last bullet. Like the orders he had given to the doomed Sixth Army at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942, Hitler issued directives that the four principal cities in the path of the Soviet advance should be held as special fortified pockets, or ‘Fester Platz’. All would be encircled and captured as tens of thousands of Germans were decimated, and the survivors marched into captivity. By 3 July, the city of Minsk fell along with what remained of the German Fourth Army. Despite his repeated requests, Field Marshal Model lacked sufficient reinforcements to remedy the situation. The problem worsened on 13 July, when the Soviet Southern Front unleashed its own campaign towards Lvov, the gateway to central Europe. The offensive’s objectives were now all but won. Some 300,000 German soldiers were killed or captured. The battered remnants of Army Group Centre now fought a hap-hazard retreat westwards in the hope of establishing a new defensive line along the River Vistula in Poland. The Red Army had pushed relentlessly westwards 500 kilometres (300 miles) in just six weeks since Bagration had started. The allies slogging their way through the bocage of Normandy against far lesser German forces paled in comparison, according to Soviet propagandists who made sure they knew of it. On 17 July, Stalin’s press corps recorded the incredible sight of 19 captured German generals leading the 57,000 men who had been taken in Minsk, through the streets of Moscow. They were marching solemnly into captivity, but not before the thousands of Muscovites lining the streets had baited and mocked them. The spectacle completed by the perfect metaphor of dozens of trucks following in the column’s wake to spray the street with disinfectant. Next stop: Berlin... Iain MacGregor is a publisher and author of history, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has specialised in World War Two and the war on the Eastern Front for many years. His latest book is The Lighthouse of Stalingrad (Constable).
From the USA's 'good war' to Britain's 'great hurrah': how is D-Day remembered around the world?
On 6 June 1944 a massive Allied invasion force descended on Normandy in France. In recent decades, ‘D-Day’, as this event is commonly known, has been the subject of persistent commemoration, with major anniversaries – like the 50th in 1994 and the 75th in 2019 – marked with televised international ceremonies. But does everyone commemorate D-Day the same way? Or does the memory of the Allied invasion look different depending on exactly who is doing the remembering?
This June, on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there will be ceremonies in Normandy and heads of state will deliver speeches. And while these speeches will undoubtedly emphasise Western unity, they will also reveal that over the years D-Day has come to mean different things to different nations over the years... D-Day in the United States: a good war D-Day looms especially large in American memory of the Second World War. American forces played a key role on 6 June and when news of the landings broke back home President Roosevelt took to the radio to lead the nation in solemn prayer. In later years, Cold War tensions only further consolidated American commitment to D-Day. Here was an eminently ‘useable’ story of freedom versus tyranny. This was certainly the subtext to the popular Hollywood film The Longest Day (1962), which depicts an American-led armada descending on the French coastline in a heroic quest to bring liberation to the oppressed. American interest in the legacy of D-Day further intensified in the late 20th century. President Ronald Reagan gave a celebrated speech during the 40th D-Day anniversary in 1984. Speaking from Pointe du Hoc in Normandy, scene of a fierce D-Day battle involving American Army Rangers, Reagan recalled the landings as a heroic endeavour in which “the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history”. In the 1990s, the D-Day histories of Stephen Ambrose – which often focused on the valour of ordinary American soldiers – sold in enormous numbers and Stephen Spielberg’s blockbuster Saving Private Ryan (1998) met with critical and commercial acclaim. In 2000 a National D-Day Museum was opened in New Orleans (since re-named the National World War II Museum), followed a year later by the dedication in Bedford, Virginia, of a National D-Day Memorial. Today, 6 June’s position in the American memory of the Second World War remains unrivalled. It is remembered as the battle which perfectly encapsulates the moral clarity of America’s ‘Good War’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/06/GettyImages-2431133-4c9b04e.jpg" width="1024" height="681" alt="US president Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Landings. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)" title="US president Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Landings. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)" /> D-Day in Great Britain: a last hurrah D-Day has similarly drawn engaged interest in Britain. British leaders were key architects of the Normandy operation; its troops took charge of two of the five invasion beaches (Gold and Sword), and on 6 June itself the Royal Navy provided the vast majority of the warships. Little wonder that the first D-Day Museum established in Normandy was built in the British invasion sector (at Arromanches). It was opened by the French president, René Coty in 1954. A national D-Day Museum followed in Portsmouth in 1984. But when compared to its American ally, British memory of D-Day has also often had a more elegiac tone, something apparent in British films. Take, for instance, the rather enigmatic Overlord (1975) as well as the more recent production The Great Escaper (2023). Both tell stories of D-Day that linger on loss rather than celebrating victory. Why is this? Read more | The women's work that made D-Day a success By September 1944 the balance of power in the Anglo-American alliance (in terms of boots on the ground in France) had shifted very firmly to the United States, and this imbalance would only grow into 1945. Herein lies the significance of D-Day to the British. It is remembered as a last hurrah, the redemption of Dunkirk, and a final moment of parity with their American allies (who were soon to be a superpower). It continues to draw national attention as such. In June 2021, a new British D-Day Memorial was unveiled in Normandy at Ver-sur-Mer. D-Day in Canada: overlooked and overshadowed Although the Americans and British often get the lion’s share of the attention, Canadian soldiers also played a crucial role on 6 June. Tasked with landing at Juno Beach (one of the five invasion beaches, sandwiched between the British at Gold and Sword), they are commemorated in a dedicated museum at Courseulles-sur-Mer as well as in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery at nearby Beny-sur-Mer. In recent years, too, Canadian prime ministers have been regular attendees at the major anniversaries, and a docudrama telling the Canadian story of D-Day – Storming Juno – was released in 2010. Nonetheless, the nation’s important role on D-Day (and at Dieppe, in 1942) is still often overshadowed by the enormous sacrifices made in the First World War by the Canadian Expeditionary Force. In short, it is Vimy Ridge on the Western Front (scene of a battle involving Canadian forces in April 1917), not Juno Beach in Normandy, which looms most prominently in Canadian memory. D-Day in France: liberation at last For the French, D-Day – or le débarquement (the landing) – occupies a complex place in national memory. It is recognised as the necessary preamble to national rebirth after four years of Nazi occupation and as such returning Allied veterans have long been given a hero’s welcome. But it is also remembered for the destruction it brought with it – the city of Caen was almost entirely obliterated during the fighting in the summer of 1944. Unlike the British, Canadians, and Americans, and although Free French troops were involved in the landings, D-Day also casts the French in a more passive role: the recipients of liberation. As a result, the French State has on occasion kept some distance from the annual commemorations. In 1964, President Charles de Gaulle – the famed wartime leader of the Free French – even refused to attend the 20th anniversary events in Normandy (his relationship with the Americans and British was often strained). More recently, though, the French have fully embraced the major anniversaries as invaluable opportunities for international diplomacy. This will again be apparent during this year’s commemorations, as too will be the esteem in which Allied veterans are held by the people of Normandy. D-Day in Germany: a blessing in disguise Despite being a key Western ally (and a member of NATO since 1955), D-Day anniversaries have understandably proved rather awkward for German leaders. Things began to change though following German reunification (1990) and the end of the Cold War (1991), with historians Gunter Bischof and Michael Maier suggesting that German media now began seeing in D-Day a “blessing in disguise” – the beginning of German liberation from Nazism. Even so, it was not until 2004 that a German Chancellor – Gerhard Schroeder – was invited to attend the official commemorations in Normandy. Today, D-Day is remembered in Germany as the fire from which the phoenix of a prosperous and progressive democracy later took flight. D-Day in Russia: long overdue Russian memory of the Normandy landings is distinct in several ways. As historian Olga Kucherenko has explained, it all comes down to a matter of perspective: when seen from the embattled Soviet Union, D-Day appears as welcome but long overdue (the Western allies had been promising to open a second front against Nazi Germany since 1942). In later years, Cold War tensions only further distanced Russians from D-Day, with the memory of the Allied invasion often seen from Moscow as something exploited by Western leaders to score propaganda points. By the 1990s, though, the world was very different. The Cold War was over and the new agenda was to integrate Russia into the international order. In 2004 – the 60th anniversary – President Putin was invited to the commemorations in Normandy. He also attended in 2014. There will be no such invitation this year (and nor was there one in 2019, the 75th anniversary), with the Russian invasion of Ukraine recently returning East-West tensions to the fore. Putin will no doubt declare indifference and focus instead on a key and on-going domestic policy: commemorating the heroism of the Soviet Red Army in the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia). Dr Sam Edwards is a historian of war, memory, and of transatlantic relations
The incredible real history of A Gentleman in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol
A Gentleman in Moscow, a new Paramount+ adaptation of the 2016 international bestselling novel by Amor Towles, follows the escapades of a disgraced aristocrat confined to the Hotel Metropol across the turbulent decades that followed the Russian Revolution. But Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov wasn’t the only illustrious guest to have checked in…
The setting for historical drama A Gentleman in Moscow is the Russian capital’s legendary Hotel Metropol. It is here where the protagonist, the noble-born Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (played by Ewan McGregor in the Paramount+ adaptation), is detained by Russia’s new Bolshevik masters after being denounced as an enemy of the revolution on account of his aristocratic heritage. Is A Gentleman in Moscow a true story? Not quite. Though Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov and the decades of house arrest that he endures within the Metropol are a work of Amor Towles’s imagination, the setting in which the events unfold is a real hotel, with a history that rivals any work of fiction. View oEmbed on the source website When was the Hotel Metropol built? Located within sight of the world-famous Bolshoi Theatre and just a short walk from Red Square and the Kremlin, the Metropol has borne witness to some of the most dramatic events in Russia’s modern history. Built in the Art Nouveau style, construction began in 1899 and was initially funded by Russian industrialist Savva Mamontov, who conceived of building a ‘palace of the arts’ capable of holding 3,000 spectators. Scottish-Russian architect William Walcot was recruited to oversee the project, while artists including Mikhail Vrubel and Alexander Golovin created the building’s celebrated décor and façades. However, Mamontov’s sudden bankruptcy (he was accused of embezzling funds from a railroad venture, and though later acquitted, he faced financial and reputational failure) led to the Petersburg Insurance company stepping in to see the project through to completion. Consequently, the building evolved from Mamontov’s original concept into more of a plush hotel with an American cocktail bar and a restaurant, in the vein of the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. When did the Hotel Metropol open? The Hotel Metropol finally opened its doors in 1905, just as revolutionary turmoil in Russia forced Tsar Nicholas II to cave in to constitutional reforms. His issue of the October Manifesto, which pledged to enshrine civil liberties and an elected legislature, was met with jubilation throughout Moscow. The Metropol was among the first in Moscow to have facilities such as refrigerators and elevators, and to provide hot water and telephones in its guest suites. It soon became a magnet for both Russia’s well-to-do set and genteel visitors from abroad on the eve of the First World War. The Metropol’s role in the Russian Revolution of 1917 The fall of the Romanov monarchy in spring 1917 paved the way for a Provisional Government, which set about establishing a Russian republic. But the October Revolution later that year saw Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks take power in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and proclaim the birth of a new socialist Soviet state. In Moscow, their opponents hunkered down within the Metropol and fortified it, but to no avail. A ferocious battle between forces loyal to the toppled Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks ensued, during which the Metropol sustained heavy damage, including broken windows and bullet-marked walls. Even throughout this ordeal, the hotel continued to cater to guests, including Tomáš Masaryk, the future founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, who witnessed the maelstrom first-hand. The aftermath of the street fighting around the hotel was described by the American journalist, John Reed, who referenced it in his classic 1919 account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. “Desperate fighting had broken out again in Moscow … White Guards [ultraconservative opponents to the Bolsheviks] held the Kremlin and the centre of the town … The Soviet artillery was stationed in Skobeliev Square, bombarding the City Duma building, the Prefecture and the Hotel Metropole [sic]”. Red star over the Metropol: the hotel as a Soviet nerve centre In 1918, the Bolsheviks moved the capital of Russia from Petrograd to Moscow. The Metropol was nationalised and became the base of many Soviet institutions, as well as home to the nascent regime’s officials and their families – a change reflected in the building’s new name: the Second House of the Soviets (the first being the former Hotel National, not far from the Metropol). To this day, a maiolica frieze along the façade of the Hotel Metropol that faces Revolution Square contains a quote from Lenin, proclaiming: “The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital.” Indeed, the hotel appears in the background of one of the era’s most iconic photographs of Lenin delivering a speech in Sverdlov Square (now Theatre Square). The Metropol’s declining fortunes after the revolution Throughout the early 1920s, the Hotel Metropol continued to act as a hub for some of the Soviet government’s organs as well as offering rooms to guests. The Bolsheviks’ disdain for bourgeois affectation meant that the building’s lavish interiors soon turned grubby from neglect. This deterioration mirrored the loss of status incurred by members of the Russian aristocracy themselves. Those who didn’t flee abroad or go underground lived in a shadow world under the surveillance of the Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB), denounced as ‘former people’. The fictional Count Rostov in A Gentleman in Moscow is one such person. Russia’s premier inn: the Hotel Metropol as the guesthouse of Stalinist civilisation But the Metropol soon became integral to the regime’s bid to obtain international recognition, as it was increasingly used to wine and dine foreign diplomats. As a consequence, the hotel also gained a reputation for impropriety and lewd liaisons. Its fêted restaurant was moved beneath the stained-glass ceiling of the Fountain Hall (which features prominently in A Gentleman in Moscow). This spectacular space was the setting for the 1925 international chess tournament, which saw the world champion, Cuba’s José Raúl Capablanca, lose the title to his Soviet opponent, Efim Bogoljubov. As the 1930s approached, with the Soviet Union in the midst of Josef Stalin’s sweeping industrialisation drive – the First Five-Year Plan – a new chapter in the Metropol’s story began. Soviet apparatchiks (bureaucrats) checked out. The hotel instead became an intrinsic part of the regime’s campaign to woo foreign visitors and impress upon them – via heady doses of propaganda plied by tour guides from the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (better known by its Russian acronym, ‘VOKS’) – the glories of the socialist system being built in the USSR. Over the following decade, significant names passed through its doors, including Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw and the British social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The 1930s was a time of immense suffering, fear and bloodshed in the Soviet Union. Millions perished from famine – notably in Ukraine – because of the Kremlin’s push to collectivise agriculture by bringing farms under state ownership. The latter part of the decade saw Stalin’s paranoid megalomania manifest into show trials and purges of his erstwhile comrades within the Soviet elite. The Metropol and the tightly-controlled tourist experience ensured that these western luminaries were distracted from this dark underbelly of Stalin’s burgeoning tyranny. Not far from the Lubyanka – the infamous headquarters of the secret police agency, the NKVD – the Metropol, like so many other places, was no stranger to the sinister incursions of Stalin’s henchmen during these years. In 1938, one of Russia’s greatest contemporary writers, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, was born in the hotel. Her early childhood there was the subject of a 2017 memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel. Fans of A Gentleman in Moscow may note similarities between Petrushevskaya’s experiences and that of the fictional Nina and Sofia in Towles’s story. The Metropol as a WW2 press corps When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin suddenly found himself breaking bread with the dogged anti-Bolshevik British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Joined by the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December that year, the Allies pooled their efforts into defeating fascism. During the Second World War (known as the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in several post-Soviet countries – most notably Russia), the Hotel Metropol became home to various Allied journalists covering news from the Eastern Front, and they transformed some of its rooms into busy press offices. Their copy was meticulously scrutinised and censored by the Soviet authorities, before being returned to the foreign reporters, invariably daubed with corrections that conformed to the heroic angle demanded by the Kremlin. The Hotel Metropol during the Cold War After the war, the hotel continued to receive international visitors. American writer John Steinbeck and war photographer Robert Capa frequented the Hotel Metropol as they embarked on a tour of the USSR to record ordinary Soviet citizens’ lives, resulting in the 1948 travelogue, A Russian Journal. That same year, Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel, took up residence in the Metropol as that nation’s first ever minister plenipotentiary (ambassador) to the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, with the Cold War beginning to heat up, Stalin welcomed the recently established People’s Republic of China into the communist camp. A reception attended by both Stalin and Mao Zedong was held in the Metropol’s aptly named Red Hall to celebrate the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance in early 1950. Does the Hotel Metropol of A Gentleman in Moscow still exist? Following Stalin’s death in 1953 and the onset of the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’, the Metropol settled into a more sedentary existence. Its renown meant that it continued to serve as the place to stay in Moscow for visiting foreign notables, including the movie star Marlene Dietrich, in the 1960s. During the late 1980s, the Metropol underwent extensive restoration while the Soviet Union embarked on an experiment of systemic political and economic reforms – perestroika and glasnost – launched by Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1991, the work on the hotel was completed just as the USSR fell apart and ceased to exist. Yet today the Metropol continues to welcome guests, and trades in its rich and astonishing legacy. 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The death of Lenin, a century on: the long afterlife of Russia’s pre-emiment revolutionary
Lenin was a towering in figure in life, but in death he became larger still. Danny Bird explores the final months of Lenin’s life, the long debate over what to do with his body, and long tail of his legacy over Russia
Born on 22 April 1870 as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, Lenin was raised within a comfortable, cultured family in the Russian provincial city of Simbirsk. Later, he would become the architect of the Soviet state and the leader of the Bolshevik party, who shot to global attention as the driving force behind the October Revolution of 1917. Most of Lenin’s adult life was spent living in Western Europe. There, he fostered ties with fellow revolutionaries and cultivated his interpretation of Marxism. Central to Lenin’s ideology was the need for a ‘vanguard’ of professional revolutionaries to guide the working class towards the destruction of capitalism and the dawn of socialism. His decisive role in the Russian Revolution came during the febrile months following the collapse of the Romanov monarchy in March 1917. A provisional government of liberal politicians replaced the ousted tsar, Nicholas II. Read more | The last days of the Romanovs Little more than a fortnight earlier, workers and soldiers in the capital, Petrograd (now St Petersburg) established a representative council to advance their demands – a council known as a ‘soviet’. Lenin’s moment came in April 1917, when he returned to Russia and exclaimed: “All power to the soviets!” to a jubilant crowd that greeted him in the city. Against the prevailing opinion of his comrades, Lenin persuaded the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional Government and seize power that autumn. The result was the founding of the world’s first ‘socialist state’, Soviet Russia. A brutal civil war then engulfed the former Russian empire. The Bolshevik regime eventually emerged triumphant, and, in December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born. At the same time, however, the health of the Soviet state’s founder was beginning to fail. Lenin’s death: how did he die? Lenin died of a stroke aged 53 on 21 January 1924 in the village of Gorki, to the south of Moscow. His comrade, Nikolai Bukharin, witnessed the death and later wrote that Lenin’s “face fell back and went terribly white. He let out a wheeze, his hands dropped. Ilich … was no more”. The Soviet leader’s constitution had always been robust. He had made a swift recovery following an assassination attempt in August 1918, and was soon back at the helm of the regime’s political machinations. He demonstrated that vigour again in spring 1922 when one of the bullets from that attack was finally extracted from his neck. A month later Lenin suffered his first stroke and was left temporarily unable to speak or write. His comrades in the Politburo – the nerve centre of the Communist Party – ordered him to recuperate at his dacha (a country house) in Gorki. Furthermore, they instructed his entourage, which included his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, not to agitate him with any talk of politics. Isolated and conscious of his mortality, Lenin turned his attention to the next generation of Bolshevik cadres and found them wanting. Despite his crackdown on factionalism within the party the year before, he foresaw a gulf beginning to open around the followers of Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin. The latter rapidly became an object of suspicion and annoyance to Lenin during his convalescence. By autumn, Lenin had recovered enough to participate in plans for the composition of the forthcoming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). However, days before the USSR’s formal inception in December 1922, he suffered another health crisis and was sent back to Gorki. While gravely unwell, he began dictating a series of texts and letters that later became known as his political ‘testament’ to his secretaries. Later, he urged the party to revoke Stalin’s position as General Secretary, rebuking him as “too coarse” and “capricious”. Despite Lenin’s demand for confidentiality, one secretary sneaked a copy to Stalin, who was dumbfounded and ordered its destruction. Instead, she made an additional copy and secured it as Lenin had instructed. After suffering an additional stroke on 10 March 1923, Lenin was left unable to talk and completely paralysed on the right side of his body. The Communist Party of Great Britain shipped out an electric wheelchair, but the right-sided configuration rendered it useless. Did Lenin beg for death? That spring, tormented by sleepless nights and headaches, Lenin begged for poison to end his suffering. With their leader’s ability to directly influence statecraft at an end and his death seemingly imminent, the tensions among the Bolshevik grandees in the Communist Party sharpened. Lenin dwindled at Gorki for another 10 months. His final stroke caused him to fall into a coma during the afternoon of 21 January 1924. His wife and sister were present when he breathed his last at 6.50pm. What happened at Lenin’s funeral? The Soviet government formally broke the news the next day and dignitaries from the Communist Party descended on Gorki to pay their respects. On 23 January, the coffin was taken from Lenin’s dacha through a crowd of local mourners lining the snowy route to Gorki’s railway station. Once it arrived in Moscow, it was taken to lie in state within the Hall of Columns at the House of the Unions. Despite below freezing temperatures of –7°C, an estimated 50,000 members of the public from across the Soviet Union, including foreign diplomats, filed past the open coffin over the next three days. Yet behind the solemnity, Stalin was already manoeuvring to consolidate his power base. On the eve of the funeral, at a special Congress of Soviets held in the Bolshoi theatre, he delivered a eulogy. Pledging to uphold Lenin’s example, he vowed “that we shall not spare our lives in strengthening the union of the working people of the entire world”, thereby obliquely staking claim to Lenin’s legacy. On 27 January, Lenin’s coffin was carried the short distance from the House of the Unions to Red Square. One notable absentee among the bearers was Trotsky, who was resting at the Black Sea resort of Sukhumi following the defeat of his bid to redress the growing Soviet bureaucracy earlier that month. Trotsky would later claim that Stalin had deliberately sent him a false date for the funeral to make his absence look disrespectful. It was such a cold day that musicians rubbed vodka on their brass instruments to prevent their lips freezing to them. At 4pm, after they performed the Soviet anthem, the Internationale, a gun salute rumbled, the Kremlin’s bells chimed and factory whistles across the Soviet Union sounded a tribute as Lenin’s coffin was interred within a custom-built shrine bearing his name in bold Russian Cyrillic characters.'. Why was Lenin embalmed? Chief among those within the Politburo who advocated for the body’s preservation was Stalin, who saw its potential as a tangible symbol of the October Revolution’s significance to the workers of the world. Lenin had been the public face of the Soviet state and was by far its most popular figure. His death threatened the regime’s legitimacy and viability. Shortly after his death, Lenin’s body was subject to an autopsy by Professor Alexei Abrikosov. He also performed a routine embalming procedure to ensure its temporary preservation while it lay in state prior to the funeral. The vast crowds that queued to pay their respects during the lying-in-state had not gone unnoticed by the Politburo. Amid the ongoing freezing temperatures, it was decided to leave Lenin’s body on display until the onset of spring. In the meantime, vast numbers of people continued to pay their respects long after the funeral. As winter dragged on, the idea of preserving the body for even longer began to take root. Some, like Trotsky and Bukharin, rejected it out of hand as anathema to Marxist beliefs, transforming Lenin into an incorruptible saint for pilgrims. Others proposed placing the body in deep freeze or suspending it in embalming fluid. Professor Vladimir Vorobiev and biochemist Boris Zbarsky were recruited to see if they could preserve Lenin’s mortal remains for as long as possible. Later that summer they informed the Politburo that they had successfully developed a process to do just that. Their technique meant that Lenin would need to be subjected to regular and ongoing maintenance. This included submerging the body in chemical baths for long periods and replacing fluids and organic matter with artificial substances. Furthermore, mildew and other superficial blemishes could be treated, and the body ‘restored’ to its original appearance. The Politburo was delighted with the breakthrough and, contrary to sanctifying Lenin’s mortal remains as a holy relic, the Communist Party extoled it as a testament to the prowess of Soviet science. Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, was aghast at the decision but her protestations held little sway. Lenin’s mausoleum: where is Lenin’s body now? Lenin’s body was originally entombed inside a simple wooden box-like structure that stood before the Senatskaya Tower, along the Kremlin’s north-eastern wall in Red Square. Its architect, Alexei Shchusev, was given the nail-biting task of crafting this in the days between the death and funeral. Later that summer, it was replaced by a grander pyramidal structure. Still in the same location and still made of wood, the new mausoleum featured a tribune from which members of the Communist Party could see and be seen by the crowds on Red Square. A competition for a permanent tomb on the same site was announced the following year. The party received more than a hundred applications but ultimately commissioned Shchusev to construct a third mausoleum out of stone, based on the aesthetic of the second. Fusing ancient mortuary architecture with the modern dynamism of Constructivism that was popular in early Soviet Russia, Shchusev incorporated marble, labradorite, porphyry and granite into his design. Completed in 1930, the striking black and ruddy sepulchre became one of the Soviet Union’s most iconic and visited monuments. In 1941, the body was evacuated to Tyumen, east of the Ural Mountains, as the invading armies of Nazi Germany threatened Moscow. Soviet victory over Hitler’s Reich saw Lenin restored to the mausoleum, whereupon Nazi banners were tossed unceremoniously at its base during the USSR’s victory parade on 24 June 1945. At its heart, inside a dimly lit chamber, Lenin, seemingly glowing under spotlights and wearing a suit and tie, lies as if asleep behind the bullet-proof glass of a sarcophagus adorned with Soviet iconography. What is Lenin’s legacy? Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Lenin’s legacy has all but receded. Many of the world’s communist parties that adhered to his ideology fell into obscurity. In 2017, the centenary of the February and October Revolutions was met with little fanfare in the Russian Federation, the internationally recognised successor to the Soviet Union. Yet, for much of the 20th century, the impacts of the October Revolution and the Leninist heritage had a profound effect on global politics. Even before his death, Lenin had been elevated into an illustrious figure by his comrades in the Soviet government. His ailing health and isolation at Gorki enabled the Kremlin to lay the foundations of the emerging cult. His demise and corporeal preservation became potent sources of propaganda. In 1924, a line from the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem Vladimir Ilich Lenin encapsulated the new omnipresence of the recently deceased: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” That same year, Petrograd, the cradle of the October Revolution, was renamed Leningrad. Lenin’s likeness became a familiar presence in everyday life – appearing in paintings, on buildings, and even adorning the mastheads of Soviet newspapers including Pravda. The party codified his writings and expounded a new state ideology, ‘Leninism’. His face, tilted confidently towards an unseen future, often appeared alongside that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as he assumed the status of a secular demigod presiding over all aspects of life within the Soviet Union. Following Lenin’s death, Stalin, in connivance with the Politburo, suppressed his political testament. As Lenin had foreseen, animus between Stalin and Trotsky soon broke out. By 1929, after being stripped of his various roles within the regime, Trotsky was banished from the USSR. In August 1940, a Stalinist henchman murdered him with an ice axe in Mexico City. Yet despite his burgeoning tyranny, even Stalin was ultimately subject to the Leninist cult he had helped raise. When he died in 1953, he too underwent the same embalming technique and was placed beside Lenin in the mausoleum. Nikita Khrushchev’s exposure of Lenin’s testament during a secret session of the Communist Party in 1956 stunned those in attendance. With his posthumous reputation in tatters, Stalin’s corpse was removed from the mausoleum in 1961. Lenin’s influence, however, remained as ubiquitous as the statuary raised across the cities of Soviet Union. The mausoleum became an altar from which the party’s leaders would review the annual cycle of parades marking May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution. Nevertheless, the tomb’s aura also made it a target for the regime’s detractors, and there were numerous attempts to desecrate it over the decades. The glass sarcophagus was shattered several times by daring assailants, while two explosions in 1967 and 1973 killed and injured bystanders. By the 1980s, while Lenin's body remained supple, the Soviet system had begun to creak. Ironically, the self-proclaimed Leninist, Mikhail Gorbachev, unveiled a series of sweeping reforms – perestroika and glasnost – which he believed would restore the USSR to Lenin’s original vision. Instead, they hastened its demise and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991. Although Lenin’s legacy melted away, his embalmed body remains a popular if not macabre tourist attraction. The method used to preserve him – a closely guarded secret to this day – was applied to other Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Calls for Lenin to receive a proper burial have often been made. The mausoleum has become something of an awkward relic in post-Soviet Russia and is frequently hidden behind elaborate stage sets during national events in Red Square. Nevertheless, the process of preserving what is now a 100-year-old corpse is ongoing and remains unique in history.