The Day Stalin Died

 

I remember the day Stalin died. March 5, 1953. I was twelve years old, in junior high school. Our teacher came into the classroom and announced, "Children, today over in Russia the evil dictator, Joe Stalin died." We all jumped up, cheered and laughed, danced around.

Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was, like me, born in 1940. I once read how he described a similar scene on that day in his Russian classroom. The teacher came into the room in tears, then tearfully announced the demise of the Great Comrade Stalin, Father of the Soviet Peoples. "Down on your knees!" she shouted. The pupils all got down on their knees, wailing and weeping.