Tag #129083 - Interview #100036 (Pesse Speranskaya)

In March 1953 Stalin died. I was in the 8th form. I remember a meeting in the conference room of our school. Our principal was telling us about the great leadership of Stalin. We were sobbing. I can remember this well. There was a terrible feeling of total confusion. We didn’t know how we were going to live on, when Stalin was not there any longer. I was growing up during the Soviet rule, and at school we were raised to be patriots of our country. There were portraits of Stalin and slogans everywhere around at school. There was a poster ‘Stalin is our teacher!’ in our classroom.  We were sobbing, and this was our frank grief. This grief gradually faded away, and after the 20th Party Congress [13] we discovered that Stalin was a true beast. Had he lived longer, all Jews would have been sent out of Estonia like they did to wealthier people back in 1941 and Estonian farmers in 1948. It was only some time later that I realized that Stalin couldn’t have been unaware of what was going on, but in 1953 I had no idea of such things.