When, 69 years ago on March 5, 1953, the news that Stalin had died echoed around the world, I did not think of Hitler, with whom he was so often compared, but Mussolini who told Emil Ludwig, a German writer who became famous for writing biographies and essays on great personalities: "Everyone dies a death that suits his character." Mussolini was shot together with his mistress and publicly hanged by his feet; For days, Stalin lay on the floor of his dacha dying, and his servants, bodyguards, members of the Politburo who had gathered did not dare or did not want to approach his body in its death throes. If he had woken up from which he might have ordered the killing of the one who would have been the first to tell him the bad news that he had had a stroke.
Until 1948, as a member of Skoja, I believed in Comrade Stalin as my liberator and great leader. I studied "A Brief History of the Soviet Union" in which he supposedly wrote an article on dialectics. When Tito confronted him, I had to declare who I was for. I didn't waver, I wasn't exposed to the worship of Stalin for as long as some older people, in post-war Yugoslavia people worshiped him Tita. Admittedly, during those stormy days of declaration, I took the graduation exam at the Secondary Technical School, which occupied me more than big politics. Only one of our friends was for Stalin, and he was a Jew. Udbaş, who interrogated him, advised him to declare that he wanted to move to Israel and that he would be released: "If you want to be a communist, you can politicize there." He only partially obeyed him: he did indeed move to Israel, but there he quickly got rich as a construction contractor and did not engage in politics.
The undisputed leader of the communist revolution Lenin before his death he wrote a note to the Central Committee who should succeed him. That document is unofficially referred to as the "Secret Testament of Lenin". He said about Trotsky that he was undeniably the most capable, but too much in love with himself, and about Stalin, who was the general secretary in charge mainly of organizational affairs, that he must be removed from that position "because he is rude", which can pass among comrades , but not in the people. However, Stalin was able to secure sufficient support from members of the party leadership, and after Lenin's death in 1924, he took over the power of the state and the party. He did what he wanted, killed all his competitors, including Trotsky, who had taken refuge in Mexico.
I have read many books about Stalin. The memoirs of Leon Trotsky left the deepest impression on me My life, Valentina Tereshkova Stalin's translator and Stalin's daughters Twenty letters to a friend. I wanted to know as much as I could about this wicked guy who was worshiped by so many, including me for a short time.
In Vienna, I lived very close to the house where Trotsky stayed for a while, I often walked right next to it. In the book "My beautiful life in hell" I write how I accidentally meet him long dead. It is also logical that Tereshkov's book attracted me, I compared my experiences as Tito's translator with his. The memoirs of Stalin's daughter written in the form of letters, which she published under her mother's surname Svetlana Alliluyeva, tell about her life with her father. It also describes the death of the mother.
Alliluyeva writes that at a drunken party in the Kremlin, Stalin insulted his wife, the mother of his two children, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, the daughter of a railway worker from the Caucasus with whom he had been friends even before the victory of the revolution. Insulted, Nadezhda returned to their apartment inside the Kremlin walls and killed herself with her lady's pistol. Stalin had a habit of sleeping in a small room at the end of the corridor after such binges, with orders that no one should wake him. In the morning, the servants found Nadezhda dead, called the doctors, party and state leadership, half of the Politburo stood in the corridor together with Svetlana until the leader appeared - no one dared to wake him up. When he found out what happened, writes Svetlana, he was visibly shaken. After that, he no longer stayed in that apartment, he moved to the dacha where he would die, because no one tried or was not allowed to help him.
Both deaths, Nadezhda's and Stalin's, correspond to their character as Mussolini claimed to die.
Svetlana died at the age of 85 in Richmond, Wisconsin, where she lived under the name Lana Peters so they wouldn't leave her alone. She died painfully, but somehow naturally, of cancer, like a normal citizen.
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