A dictator turns seventy Historian Juliane Fürst recalls Joseph Stalin’s twilight years

By Dr. Juliane Fürst

Vladimir Putin turns 70 years old today. Ramzan Kadyrov has already announced that the day will be celebrated with pomp and circumstance in Chechnya. In Moscow, expect more muted felicitations, but there will still be a roll call of the powerful showing their deference. But there will be no standing ovations at the Bolshoi Theater as there were for Joseph Stalin on December 21, 1949, when the Soviet leader celebrated his 70th birthday. It is also unlikely that Xi Jinping will come to congratulate Putin in person, as Mao Zedong famously did in 1949, ushering in the first of many short-lived waves of Sino-Soviet co-operation. (And even if Xi did come, he would arrive as Putin’s master not as a junior partner.) There are remarkable similarities and important differences between these two long-serving dictators at the age of 70, explains historian Juliane Fürst in a guest essay for Meduza.

Whereas Stalin became a septuagenarian at the height of his power, four years after a victorious war that extended the Soviet empire and served as a potent unifier of his people, Putin’s position at the epicenter of power is far from certain and is ironically threatened most by those sycophantically celebrating his anniversary.

Yet, details notwithstanding, there are also remarkable parallels between Stalin’s position in 1949 and Putin’s today. Both leaders look back on a more-than-20-year rule, in which they gradually but unmistakably tightened the screws on any kind of opposition — Stalin a bit earlier and more decisively than Putin, who for a long time left a façade of permitted dissent, especially in the cultural sphere.

Both also pathologically fear(ed) old age with its physical frailty and loss of command. Putin’s every youthful self-fashioning was matched by Stalin’s extreme control over his image in the last few years of his reign. He hardly ever appeared in public, censored photographs of his image, and preferred to use film doubles in visuals for the Soviet population. Harrison Salisbury, the long-time New York Times correspondent, recounted around the time of Stalin’s 70th birthday how people had gathered in shock around a shop window where a photo was exhibited showing Stalin with grey hair. Putin is more visible, but he too resorts to recorded and staged videos and keeps absolute privacy about his health and well-being.

While Stalin’s last years were quieter compared to the terror of the 1930s, it was by no means clear at the time that they would remain so. Stalin’s external war had been fought and won by 1949, but internally he unleashed a number of smaller purges in Leningrad and Georgia and ruled with an iron hand everywhere else. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign, formally started in 1948, reminded East and West alike that Stalin continued to rule by division and ethnic persecution. In 1952, the pressure was ratcheted upward further when several Jewish doctors working for the Kremlin were arrested on charges of treason and murdering Stalin’s ally, Andrey Zhdanov.

When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the country (and the foreign press corps) had for some time been expecting the forced resettlement of the 2 million Soviet Jews residing within the USSR’s borders — an idea no less crazy and brutal than the unprovoked invasion of a neighboring country.

In 1949, as well as in October 2022, it is hard to imagine Moscow without the leaders who define the country’s image, so much so that they are synonymous with their regimes. Few could imagine in 1949 that Stalinism would be over soon, just as Putin’s system feels irrevocably entrenched today. And yet not only did Stalin’s successors, who had been his loyal cronies, dismantle public representations of him almost immediately — the Soviet people, too, moved on with astonishing speed.

After the ill-fated funeral where dozens of people were crushed in a stampede, Stalin disappeared from peoples’ thoughts surprisingly quickly (albeit not completely). In many ways, the 1953–1956 years were the most turbulent of the Thaw period, characterized by multiple challenges to the Stalinist way things had been done. This was especially true in universities, the Komsomol, and other youthful spaces, where not only Stalin but the system found itself under attack.

With hindsight, it’s clear that Stalin lost large parts of the young generation in his final years — especially the young intelligentsia, even if (barring a few exceptions) young people did not rebel en masse against the regime. People in this demographic were born too late to benefit from the social mobility Stalinist policies engendered in the 1930s and were quasi-disenfranchised by the Soviet Union’s second founding myth: victory in the Great Patriotic War.

The veteran generation’s dominance over Soviet politics and society was only broken with the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time of Stalin’s death was a student at Moscow State University and whose first political steps as a Komsomol organizer in the law department came in the heady days of post-Stalinism. Meanwhile, young men with quiffs and a love for Western fashion listened to jazz on Voice of America and paraded their colorful socks and ties on Gorky Street. They outdid each other in stylish innovation and (unconsciously) created an ideological and visual counterpoint to their elders’ military culture and Stalinist puritanism.

Putin has also disenfranchised the young by catering almost exclusively to the psychological needs of Russia’s older generation. Unlike Stalin who had a victory at his disposal, Putin’s generational focal point has always been a negative one (at least in his estimation): the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin’s frequent rallying around the memory of Western betrayals in the “terrible 1990s” does not resonate with those who have no active memory of the period and whose experience of the West is determined by actual encounters rather than imaginary u- or dys-topias.

Long before the war against Ukraine drove many young people across Russia’s borders, Putin’s star had declined among this segment of the population. 

None of this can tell us what the future holds for Putinist or post-Putinist Russia. Stalin died before he could fully implement his last great bloodletting, while Putin has embarked on his biggest aggression yet, just as he turns 70 (and we do not know what he will do next).

The reports and documents we have detailing Stalin’s life in his twilight years testify to the fact that age does not mellow dictators but heightens their paranoia and intensifies their desperate grip on power. The fear of imminent death and the immunity to commit literally any activity combine in dictators to form a chilly climate that’s safe for no one — not even the wives of top politicians (for example, Molotov’s Jewish wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested in 1948).

Even when living standards rise (as they did after 1947) and people find belonging in the collective veneration of their leader, these regimes can be unexpectedly fragile. It’s not for nothing that Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg likened the late Stalinist years to a winter — a winter that had no end in sight until March 5, 1953.