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In March 1953 Stalin died. He wasn’t my idol. I had no idols. Many people grieved after him, as if he was their dearest person. I felt no grief. I can’t say I was sure about certain things, but my intuition told me that he knew about all these horrors in the USSR and he must have given his orders. At the Twentieth Party Congress [30] Nikita Khrushchev [31] exposed Stalin’s crimes, and I was horrified. It’s one thing to assume, and a totally different thing when you hear the proof. We were hoping for improvement, but nothing of this kind happened. Anti-Semitism didn’t disappear, and we were still separated from the rest of the world. The USSR was still surrounded by the Iron Curtain [32].
Interview
Miriam Patova