After watching the ABC1 docudrama “Who Killed Stalin?”(BBC 2005)1 I felt moved to write the following prose-poem. After Stalin died, perhaps from poisoning, on 6 March 1953, Georgy Malenkov became the premier of the Soviet Union. Lavrenty Beria became minister of the interior and Vyacheslav Molotov foreign minister. Nikita Khrushchev, in a power struggle with Stalin’s heir apparent Malenkov and after grappling with different factions, became first secretary of the Communist Party on 7 September 1953.

In the first six months after Stalin’s death, from March through August 1953, Lavrenty Beria controlled much of the political realm. Beria did this partly by merging the ministry of internal affairs and state security. A band of highly positioned men in the party: Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Bulganin and some others united under Khrushchev to denounce Beria and remove him from power. They all feared that Beria would try to kill them all. Khrushchev was not nearly as powerful as party leader when he took office in September 1953 as he would eventually become in the decade 1953 to 1964 when he retired. Khrushchev’s leadership as first secretary of the Communist Party marked a crucial transition in the political life of the Soviet Union. -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1 TV, 8 January 2009, 8:35-9:30 p.m.

These events of 1953 in the Soviet Union synchronized with the Baha’i Holy Year, an occasion celebrating the Centenary, the hundredth anniversary, of the Birth of the Revelation, the first intimations of the glorious Mission, of the Founder of the Baha’i Faith in the Siyah-Chal in Teheran. This event in the international Baha’i community was the anniversary of an epoch-making period unsurpassed by any episode in the world’s spiritual history outside Baha’i history. This Holy Year also saw the dedication of the Mother Temple of the West, the holiest in all the Baha’i world in Chicago on 2 May 1953, an event which marked the inception, again from a Baha’i perspective, of the Kingdom of God on earth and the appearance in the world of existence of “a most wonderful and thrilling motion.”2 In 1953 gilded golden tiles were placed on the dome of the Shrine of the Báb. This was the last unit of that shrine and symbolized the consummation of the greatest enterprize undertaken at the World Centre of this Faith. The year 1953 also saw the inauguration of a ten year world spiritual crusade, the third stage of the first epoch of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’is Divine Plan during which my parents and I became members of the Baha’i Faith in Canada. -Ron Price with thanks to ‘Abdu’l-Baha in God Passes By, Shoghi Effendi, Wilmette, 1957, p.351.
I was only in grade four back then and
just beginning my baseball-years-career,
a fleeting period and my ice-hockey life;
my adolescence and life in a little town
in a little house in a little world with its
birthday-parties, TV programs, endless
indulgences, straight lines at school and
pretty little girls marked: don’t touch!!!

My mother accepted an invitation to a
home of one of those conspirators who
drank from one of those same wells the
ones that could be found, by then——all
around the planet. Not dismayed were
these co-conspirators by headlines they
called to their witness; they carried the
answers like neat balls of coloured yarn,
familiarly handled, spun of truth and in
their ready-made dresses, sensible shoes.

How did my mother get caught in their
web back then when Krushchev was on
his way to the top and a Holy Year was
giving a wonderful and thrilling motion
its kick-start, a kick-start to the Kingdom
of God on earth—and no one really knew?

Ron Price
9 January 2009