The Last Days of Stalin by Joshua Rubenstein (review)

In The Last Days of Stalin Joshua Rubenstein presents three intertwined stories—the Soviet dictator’s incitement of renewed persecutions in the months before his death, the early reform efforts of his successors, and debates within the U.S. government about how to respond to the “softening” of the Soviet regime. Along the way, Rubenstein handles topics of great significance for the history of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Among these are Iosif Stalin’s (supposed) anti-Semitism, his motivations for prosecuting the so-called Doctor’s Plot, the readiness of the post-Stalin Soviet leaders to ratchet down tensions with the West, and the resistance of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and his advisers to doing so. Rubenstein’s book is a good read, concise and absorbing, and it follows the latest scholarship on the months around Stalin’s death.

The Last Days of Stalin opens with the first Soviet press announcement of Stalin’s fatal illness, on 4 March 1953, and moves quickly to the deathbed scenes at his dacha. Rubenstein does an excellent job of presenting the different (and differing) witnesses to Stalin’s final days. Moving back and forth between Stalin’s dacha, the Moscow streets, the Soviet press, Washington, and New York, this first chapter neatly presents the Cold War background, the atmosphere in Soviet society, Stalin’s family situation, and relations among his potential successors.

In the final months of his life, Stalin seemed to threaten a new wave of repression. He publicly humiliated the three remaining members of the leadership team that had been with him since the mid-1920s: Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Kliment Voroshilov. He also instigated the prosecution, on trumped up charges of treason, of several Jewish doctors serving the party leadership, as well as a campaign against “cosmopolitans” (read “Jews”) in literature and the arts. Stalin’s motives in these cases are not easy to discern. Rubenstein deals with them in chapters two and three. With regard to Molotov, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov, he suggests that Stalin was following a pattern reaching as far back as the late 1920s, getting rid of senior leaders with pre-revolutionary party credentials. This makes sense, so far as it goes, but an explanation of the timing of Stalin’s attacks remains elusive.

Rubenstein downplays Stalin’s putative anti-Semitism in his analysis of the Doctor’s Plot and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. Instead, he puts both in the context of the Cold War and the resurgence of Jewish identity in the USSR following the establishment of the Israeli state. For Stalin this could be read only as Zionist “nationalism” and a threat to the unity of the USSR. In his mind the existence of an independent Jewish state with powerful Western connections made Soviet Jews potential traitors. Although Rubenstein does not make this point explicit, official Soviet attacks on Jewish nationalism were on this view analogous to prewar attacks on Soviet citizens of Polish, German, and Latvian origin. If there existed an independent state corresponding to a given Soviet ethnic group, the Stalinist regime suspected that group of treason. Was Stalin at the end of his life planning a campaign of mass deportations and arrests of Jews resembling those unleashed during the Great Terror of the 1930s against the Poles and others? Rubenstein carefully analyzes evidence that Stalin was planning such “mass operations” against Soviet Jews, but finds it wanting. The dictator’s goals were probably more limited or more diffuse. Rubenstein’s approach to the question is judicious, far superior to potboilers such as Arkady Vaksberg’s Stalin against the Jews, which falsely equate Stalin’s plans for the Jews with Hitler’s.

Immediately after Stalin’s death, his successors implemented major, albeit limited, reforms. These included reducing the use of forced labor, revision of the criminal code, mass amnesties for prisoners, and public disavowal of the accusations in the Doctor’s Plot case. Of course, Rubenstein points out, the regime remained authoritarian, intolerant...