"Becoming Stalin" on France Culture: how Stalin fell victim to the terror he had established

Is Stalin dead or alive? On the night of Saturday, February 28, to Sunday, March 1, 1953, the answer was very uncertain. After a boozy dinner that ended early in the morning at the Kuntsevo dacha, his inner circle – the Berias, Malenkovs, and Molotovs – left the master of the USSR “quite drunk” and “in an excellent mood.”

The words are Nikita Khrushchev's own, memories recorded on magnetic tape in the late 1960s, excerpts of which have never been heard on the radio in the remarkable documentary series on France Culture .

The next day, there was no news of "Koba," as his close friends called him. When the Cheka men found him lying on the ground, soaking in his own urine, everyone was afraid to wake him in such a predicament. One wrong word was enough to send you to the gulag or the stake. When they arrived that evening, his close associates were having a hard time finding a doctor, the so-called "white coat conspiracy" having triggered a wave of arrests in the profession some time earlier.

Twelve hours passed before the diagnosis of a stroke was made. Stalin died five days later, on March 5. "It's a very revealing moment for the system he had created ," analyzes historian Oleg Khlevniuk. "And ultimately, this system turned against him."

It is this regime of terror, born of Stalin's paranoia and violence, that Marie Chartron dissects in her fascinating documentary. She also sets out to tell the story of how Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, a young Georgian poet, became Joseph Stalin, the implacable Soviet dictator.

How he shaped his image to the point of monitoring any reproduction of his portrait across the communist bloc. "A portrait of Stalin dead and alive," summarizes Marie Chartron, who recalls how much his memory remains vivid in Russia, where, after having toppled the statues in his image, the Putin regime is erecting new ones...