I just saw a news item about Joseph Stalin. He’s been dead for almost fifty-eight years, so you might wonder what could be new about him. But there is a departure of sorts in this from RIA-Novosti:

 

The Georgian Culture Ministry said on Tuesday it would build a monument to victims of the 2008 war with Russia and Soviet-era purges to replace a statue of dictator Joseph Stalin in his hometown of Gori.

The six-meter statue of the Soviet dictator on a nine-meter granite pedestal was erected in Gori’s central square in 1952 and demolished last June.

It will be replaced by 11 naked walking figures, representing Georgian victims of the war with Russia in August 2008 and victims of Stalinist repression.

Stalin was born in Gori in 1879.

TBILISI, February 8 (RIA Novosti)

 

Stalin was idolized for years by many Georgians. He was the Georgian who seized and ruled the Soviet Empire for decades, the epitome of the strong leader that Russians have always admired, a secular Tsar, a colossus from a small town in a very small country. He was at once strong and astute, a mostly self-educated and by no means stupid survivor, autocrat and boss.

And yet . . . He was the destroyer of peoples, the unpredictable man with the yellow eyes of a tiger who could pounce even on his fellow Georgians, even on his personal friends. And then, perhaps, after a while there were no friends. No man who is feared as much as Stalin can have friends.

It is said that as Stalin lay dying he was heard to mutter angrily to himself. No one can know what it was he said, or heard, or saw. But one might imagine a vast loneliness. I tried to put that into a poem in my book of poems, From Here to Babylon:

 

THE ONLY SIGN OF LIFE

 

When Stalin died

No one at the station came to greet him

The platform deserted, the green train dropped him off

In the midst of a dry plain, scrub and yellow dust

But nothing else

Where were his aides, his bodyguards?

Had he descended solo?

The long train was gone

 

And Stalin looked around.

Stationmaster!

No one answered, and the earthly shadows did not move

It was late in the afternoon

And there was no long dry wind to blow

Over the flat scrub plain — 

Of Kazakhstan?

 

Who is there?

Inside the heavy door he found a ticket counter

But when he peered across the board he saw

A sun bar on the wall, diagonal

But nothing, no one there

Between himself and that unyielding stripe

 

Empty. No one has come out to greet me.

He went looking for the lavatory

To wash his hands and face

But when he turned the faucets only dust came out

A puff, a sigh, and that a little only —

He gazed up to the speckled mirror, saw his own pale face

Unreadable expression

Yet perhaps some puzzlement?

It was the only sign of life

 

So many people died

But have they all died now?