7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time 7the United States,
against whom he
embarked on the Cold
War. At home, the
primacy of Marxist
ideology was harshly
reasserted, and Stalin’s
chief ideological hatchet
man, Andrey Zhdanov,
a secretary of the
Central Committee,
began a reign of
terror in the Soviet
artistic and intellec-
tual world. Hopes for
domestic relaxation,
widely aroused in the
Soviet Union during the
war, were thus sadly
disappointed.
Increasingly suspi-
cious and paranoid in
his later years, Stalin ordered the arrest, announced in
January 1953, of certain—mostly Jewish—Kremlin doc-
tors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet
leaders, including Zhdanov. The dictator was evidently
preparing to make this Doctors’ Plot the pretext for yet
another great terror menacing all his senior associates, but
he died suddenly on March 5.
Noted for bringing the Soviet Union into world prom-
inence, at terrible cost to his own people, Stalin left a
legacy of repression and fear as well as industrial and mili-
tary power. In 1956 Stalin and his personality cult were
denounced by Nikita Khrushchev.
Joseph Stalin, 1950. Sovfoto