Often times there's a lot of controversy about if a leader is really in charge, or if they are merely a figurehead for some group of masterminds behind the scenes. The thing I like about studying Russia under Stalin is that Stalin was the one actually in charge. More than any other leader of the 19th or 20th century, he held the whole thing together almost singlehandedly. He had to because he got rid of people so regularly that there was no one else who had been there long enough to even know how to run things.
The other interesting thing about studying Stalin is that very few people liked him enough to hide his dirty laundry after he died. There are very few secrets about him and all the little awful details of his life are freely available to his biographers.
The degree to witch the Personality of the Leader is reflect in the country can be quite absurd.
In any Gulag you would find amazing musicians, dancers and so on. But not singer, Stalin liked them to much. The cultural landscape of a country altered by the simple preference of one men.
We don't have everything, people like Ygoda seem to have gone threw the document and removed things that would negatively reflect on him.
This is not true. It took super little searching to find Vadim Kozin and Lidia Ruslanova. And it is not like I would be an expert. The reason I searched was that this anecdote makes zero sense in the context of how Russia under Stalin or Stalin himself operated. Liking something too much would not prevent either from crushing that something hard.
There are lots of examples in which artists that Stalin respected where crushed less hard than one might expect them to be crushed, Zamyatin comes to mind.
Evgeny Zamyatin was not a singer, so I really dont think this proves singers were uniquely safe. Also, reading story, he had contacts which allowed him to get passport and leave as he was persecuted.
The political persecution he was under was not that unusual for times. It strikes me more like "I heard many stories kinda like that" then super unusual.
"The other interesting thing about studying Stalin is that very few people liked him enough to hide his dirty laundry after he died."
I think that comes naturally, if everyone important around him, had to fear for their life for years. One wrong look, or just one bad mood of the great leader - and someone gone again. They never knew what to expect, when being summoned, praise or prison - and that was intentional. Absolute power. Reign of terror. And always in paranoid fear, of a plot against the great leader.
I think there was a great relief in the inner circles, with his death.
"The First Circle" by Solzhenitzyn is a great read. The caricature of Stalin in that book is absurd, I am not talking about that.
There is a historical character Abakumov [1], and in one of his reflections, (from my memory) he rues the fact that he was inducted into the inner circle of Stalin. One moment of displeasure, and he could be gone. And there is no way out of the inner circle other than perhaps, death.
Mikoyan, the guy who started the aircraft design bureau, was the only one in Stalin's inner circle to stay there the whole time, not get executed and have a good career in the next administration after Stalin died. He was the ultimate political survivor.
I think that's debatable when it comes to WW2, especially the years when the
Germans were on Soviet soil, roughly 1941-1943, otherwise you are of course correct.
What I found very interesting about Stalin is that he knew what people to choose. For example he got rid of Budyonny [1] pretty fast after the disaster in Kyiv, even though Budyonny had been one of his protégées and had helped him (Stalin) get rid of Tukhachevsky in the Great Purge.
Not only that, but pretty soon Budyonny's place was taken by Rokossovsky [2], who in early 1940 was still actually in the Gulag but by late 1941 had successfully defended Moscow against the Germans, was there when von Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad and was in this famous photo [3] walking triumphantly near the Brandenburg gate in July 1945.
The other interesting thing about studying Stalin is that very few people liked him enough to hide his dirty laundry after he died. There are very few secrets about him and all the little awful details of his life are freely available to his biographers.