Red carnations for Stalin

Press, 7 March 1978, Page 9

Red carnations for Stalin

NZPA-Reuter Moscow> Relatives of Joseph Stalinwere allowed to place wreaths and flowers on his j Red Square grave on Sun-; day, but the 25th anniver-l sary of the dictator’s death passed without official 1 notice in Moscow'. Among relatives who vis-' ited the grave by the wall of the Kremlin were his grand-1 son, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili,; and two small great-grand-sons who together carried a wreath. As on earlier anniversaries j of Stalin’s death, the officialSoviet press made no men-; tion of the occasion. Yet; comments among sightseers on Red Square indicated that the anniversary was not for-, gotten.

There was a buzz of excitement as the small group of relatives was granted access to the grave and the grey granite bust after the area had been closed to the public. Later a woman appeared, on her own, and left a bunch of red carnations. "So there go Stalin’s relatives,” said one onlooker. , Nearby a couple was trying I to decide just how many years it was since Stalin died. Stalin, born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, had three children. Yakov, Yevgeny’s father, was a Red Army lieutenant who was taken prisoner by the Germans and shot dead at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin, in 1943. Stalin’s younger son, Vas-

-lily, was an air force general >!who died in 1962, reputedly 11 from drink. His daughter, j I Svetlana Alliluyeva, fled the U Soviet Union in 1967 and 5I now lives in the United ■ - States under the name of 11 Lana Peters. Members of the public . | who wanted to see the grave Jhad to join the usual long i queue of visitors which filed • I through the Lenin Mausoleum until mid-afternoon | and then past the graves! . along the Kremlin wall. ,i- Stalin’s body lay em- , i balmed beside Lenin’s inside I 1 the mausoleum until 1961, si when it was moved to the -present grave during the; -; “de-Stalinisation campaign” iilaunched by the late Nikita: Khrushchev. The bust was - unveiled in June, 1970.

Though the anniversary of ■ Stalin’s death was not marked officially, his name ! received a rare mention — ; I and applause — at a Krem- i I lin ceremony only last f month. Nowadays attention is focused on the dictator’s role • in World War Two which ; has been “rehabilitated” by I several recent films and • novels depicting Stalin as a 11wise and tireless war leader ;■— not the arrogant amateur portrayed by Khrushchev. Occasionally, the Kremlin . refers also to Stalin’s “viola- ( tions of socialist legality.” ! but Soviet leaders generally .-prefer to say as little as possible about the dark side i of his nearly 30 years in ; power. Allegations like those | made by Khrushchev, who accused Stalin of butchering thousands erf dedicated communists for imaginary political crimes, have not been i heard since Khrushchev’s fall in 1964. The Soviet authorities I tend to make more of birth- ! days than the anniversaries

of deaths, so that a new test of official attitudes to Stalin will come in December, next I year, on the centenary of his birth.