The Death of Stalin by Sheila Fitzpatrick: Watch out! Stalin's coming back into fashion...

An old man of 74 lies helpless on the floor. He is partly paralysed from a massive stroke, and has wet himself.

The man is Joseph Stalin, responsible for the deaths of millions of people – perhaps as many as 20 million.

In The Death Of Stalin, perhaps the world’s foremost historian of the Soviet era, Sheila Fitzpatrick, gives us the full darkly comic but grisly details of Stalin’s last days.

She factually covers the same ground as Armando Iannucci’s hilarious but not accurate film, also called The Death Of Stalin.

The first absurdity was that initially, when Stalin failed to appear that day, no one dared to enter his room to see if he was all right.

They were all too terrified of him. So the hours ticked by on March 1, 1953, while his household and senior members of the Soviet government, including the dreaded head of Stalin’s secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, waited around.

They might have sent in his doctor, except that Stalin had recently sent him to prison!

Eventually, at around 6pm, they saw a light come on in the Great Leader’s room, and sent the housekeeper in to see if he was all right. With no doctor available they did their best to haul him back on to the sofa and left him apparently sleeping. When doctors finally came the next day they confirmed he had had a stroke. Since Stalin had been warned for years about the risks of his drinking and smoking, it can’t have surprised any of them.

There was more chaos surrounding who was to succeed him. The problem was, Stalin had killed off his best and brightest colleagues in his paranoia, and the rest mistrusted and hated each other. For a time, the favourite seemed to be Beria, but finally the mantle of successor fell on the somewhat more moderate Nikita Khrushchev.

Stalin died on March 5, at his country villa. Immediately the Soviet propaganda machine swung into action, telling the Russian people that he had actually died in Moscow, in the Kremlin.

Stalin’s body was brought quietly to Moscow and lay in state in the Hall of Monuments, with thousands filing past to pay their final respects. Some of them had been drilled at school to chant, ‘Thank you, comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!’. Stalin was then buried with full honours beside Lenin.

Russia’s former allies from the Second World War sent condolences, with France declaring three days of official mourning. Pope Pius XII was somewhat sterner, ‘Stalin had arrived at the end of his arid life and must account to the Almighty for his actions.’

Not long after Khrushchev’s coming to power, and with greater openness about the past, the public mood began to turn. One incredible statistic showed people just how murderous Stalin had been even to his own: 70 per cent of the Central Communist Committee elected in 1934 had been taken out and shot by 1939.

Finally his body was dug up from beside Lenin and reburied near the Kremlin walls. And a mountain in Central Asia named Mount Stalin was renamed Mount Communism.

In Ukraine he is still regarded as the epitome of evil – his engineered famine there in the 1930s, the terrible Holodomor, killed as many as six million people. But in Russia his reputation is rising rapidly once more. In the 1990s only 26 per cent of Russians viewed Stalin favourably, but today this is well over 50 per cent.

How can this be? Well, as Fitzpatrick shrewdly concludes in this fascinating little study, ‘Status in the world is something that Russians cherish and feel they have lost. Superpower status in a bipolar world was a once-in-a-millennium highlight of Russian history, and Stalin was the man at the top when it happened.’