Tag #154337 - Interview #94611 (Natan Shapiro)

Stalin’s death in 1953 was a real tragedy for all of us. It felt like the state wasn’t going to survive without him and like life had stopped. The Twentieth Party Congress [18], denunciation of the cult of Stalin was a big surprise for us. We were all crying when a letter of the Central Committee of the USSR was read at the party meeting in our department, about the denunciation of the cult of Stalin, but at the beginning it was only disclosed to the party members – that was why it was called ‘closed letter’ meaning ‘sensitive.’ We were stunned to hear that Stalin was to blame for the death of dozens of thousands of repressed and executed people.