Front Cover: Stalin - the God who fell (1961)

The Front Page of the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

I don't usually make a habit of dedicating a post to the front cover of a Socialist Standard but, in this case, the Editorial Committee obviously thought it was important to lay out some information on the front cover to pass comment on the Kremlinology of the day.

The picture on the front cover of the December 1961 Socialist Standard dates from March 1953 and it features the then Soviet Communist Party grandees standing guard around the body of Stalin who was lying in state. The text in the top right hand corner of the page above the picture names the grandees and their current political status in 1961:

SCENE: MOSCOW MARCH 1953 The eight most powerful men in Russia stand guard beside the body of their late chief - Stalin.

Dramatis Personae 

Left to right                Status December 1961

Molotov                  Ex foreign Minister (in disgrace)

Voroshilov          Ex President (in disgrace)

Beria                         Late Minister of Interior (shot as traitor)

Malenkov                  Ex Prime Minister (in disgrace) 

The Corpse              The God who fell

Bulganin                   Ex Prime Minister (in disgrace) 

Khruschev                Prime Minister (future?) 

Kaganovitch             Ex Vice-President (in disgrace) 

Mikoyan                  Deputy Prime Minister (future?)

In the bottom right hand corner of the front cover there is a quote from the article, From Lenin to Stalin by Ted Wilmott, which appeared in the April 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard:

From the Socialist Standard April 1953 

Maintenance of power at any price became for the Communist Party a matter of life and death. On a chequer board of political tactics the Old Bolshevik moved, mated and stayed, until the assumption of power rested in one man — Stalin . . . It was Stalin who completed the work begun by Lenin, the turning of Marxism a revolutionary doctrine into its opposite, an authoritarian ideology of state capitalism on a par and at times competing with other state ideologies, i.e. Hitler's National "Socialism" and Mussolini's Corporate State.

The front cover headline, Stalin - the God who fell, was the title of that month's editorial.