Front Cover: Stalin – the God who fell

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

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?)

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.