This is the obituary that legendary Pan-Africanist, American-born author W. E. B. Du Bois dedicated to J. V. Stalin after his death on 5 March 1953. It was published on the National Guardian, a left-wing newspaper founded in 1948 in New York City, which ceased publication in 1992.

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Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also — and this was the highest proof of his greatness — he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.

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His judgment of men was profound. He early saw through the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Trotsky, who fooled the world, and especially America. The whole ill-bred and insulting attitude of Liberals in the U.S. today began with our naive acceptance of Trotsky’s magnificent lying propaganda, which he carried around the world. ^[3] Against it, Stalin stood like a rock and moved neither right nor left, as he continued to advance toward a real socialism instead of the sham Trotsky offered.

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Then came intervention, the continuing threat of attack by all nations, halted by the Depression, only to be re-opened by Hitlerism. It was Stalin who steered the Soviet Union between Scylla and Charybdis: Western Europe and the U.S. were willing to betray her to fascism, and then had to beg her aid in the Second World War. ^[6] A lesser man than Stalin would have demanded vengeance for Munich, but he had the wisdom to ask only justice for his fatherland. This Roosevelt granted but Churchill held back. The British Empire proposed first to save itself in Africa and southern Europe, while Hitler smashed the Soviets. ^[7] [8]

The Second Front dawdled, but Stalin pressed unfalteringly ahead. He risked the utter ruin of socialism in order to smash the dictatorship of Hitler and Mussolini. After Stalingrad the Western World did not know whether to weep or applaud. The cost of victory to the Soviet Union was frightful. To this day the outside world has no dream of the hurt, the loss and the sacrifices. For his calm, stern leadership here, if nowhere else, arises the deep worship of Stalin by the people of all the Russias.

Here Stalin showed his real greatness. He neither cringed nor strutted. He never presumed, he never surrendered. He gained the friendship of Roosevelt and the respect of Churchill. ^[9] He asked neither adulation nor vengeance. He was reasonable and conciliatory. But on what he deemed essential, he was inflexible. He was willing to resurrect the League of Nations, which had insulted the Soviets. He was willing to fight Japan, even though Japan was then no menace to the Soviet Union, and might be death to the British Empire and to American trade. But on two points Stalin was adamant: Clemenceau’s “Cordon Sanitaire” must be returned to the Soviets, whence it had been stolen as a threat. ^[10] The Balkans were not to be left helpless before Western exploitation for the benefit of land monopoly. The workers and peasants there must have their say.

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1. Stalin was Georgian, an ethnic minority within the Russian Empire. He wrote a theoretical work of surpassing importance, Marxism and the National Question (1913), which grappled with the tension between nationalism and internationalism, and brought him renown within revolutionary ranks. [web] ↩

2. Roland Boer traces the reverberating influence of Stalin’s theoretical work and enacted policy in From Affirmative Action to Anti-Colonialism: Stalin and the Prehistory of Post-Colonialism (2016). [web] ↩

3. Trotsky went as far as agreeing to speak at the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) led by ultraconservative segregationist Martin Dies in 1939, and wrote an article for Socialist Appeal magazine explaining his rationale (opposition to “totalitarian forms”). [web] ↩

4. Douglas Tottle’s Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (1987) is a fantastic account of how Nazi propaganda has completely distorted the understanding of this period of Soviet history in the West. [web] ↩

5. Another interesting document is Mark Tauger’s review dismantling one of the most representative examples of the genre, Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017). [web] ↩

6. Harry Truman, US President 1945-53, as Senator in 1941, infamously argued: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” [web] ↩

7. In September 1938 Germany, Britain, France, and Italy signed the “Munich Agreement,” allowing an openly antisemitic Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and its 3 million inhabitants. [web] ↩

8. The Molotov-Ribbentrop (“Soviet-Nazi”) defense pact from August 1939 was only signed after Britain and France rejected the Soviet offer to send a million troops to stop Hitler as part of a united anti-fascist front. [web] ↩

9. Susan Butler’s Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership (2015) describes some of these dynamics in more depth. [web] ↩

10. In March 1919 French PM Georges Clemenceau urged states that had seceded from Russian Empire throughout WW1 to form a defensive pact in order to isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of Western Europe, and backed it with French participation in 1921. He coined the term cordon sanitaire to refer to this alliance. European aggression starting immediately after the revolution of 1917 marked the real beginning of the so-called “Cold War.” [web] ↩