Josef Stalin in the East End of London
When a young Stepney housewife answered a knock on her front door on March 5, 1953, she expected to find one of her friends or neighbours on the other side – maybe even her mum, who lived next door.
But Golda Berk was in for a shock. Standing outside her tenement door in Jubilee Street were reporters from radio stations and newspapers – and not just from Fleet Street but all around the world.
It was the culmination of an extraordinary story that united refugees from Russia a half century apart.
Golda Berk was born in the East End in 1923, the daughter of Louis Toubervitch.
Joseph Stalin the political refugee
Louis had journeyed with his parents from the Ukrainian city of Kiev, just one of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who travelled from Russia and the East to the sanctuary of London.
But what had brought the world’s media to her doorstep was the death of one of the most powerful men on the planet. For the man, who would later be known as Joseph Stalin, had lodged at 75 Jubilee Street as an impoverished young political refugee 46 years before.
Stalin the cobbler’s son
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugas-hvili, aka Stalin, was born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, Georgia, the son of a cobbler.
He was a cruel child. Schoolmates would relate how he would stone birds for fun and greet news of sickness among fellow pupils with a cold smile.
Perhaps it was because of his own misfortunes.
He was a sickly boy, badly scarred by smallpox and born with a crippled left arm. He stood only 5ft 4ins tall – throughout his life, the self-conscious dictator wore platform shoes.
Stalin at Tblisi Academy
But Iosif was a bright boy and a hard worker, winning a scholarship to the Tblisi Academy. His first career, as an accountant, did not hold his interest. While a student, Iosif had been absorbing the revolutionary works of Karl Marx and became involved in the first stirrings of the Russian Revolution.
These were dangerous times and Iosif was frequently on the run. He was arrested in 1902 and imprisoned for 18 months – after his sentence, Stalin was sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia.
He escaped in 1904 and met Lenin for the first time the following year, at a Bolshevik conference in Finland.
Stalin in Jubilee Street
Then, like many Russian revolutionaries, he fetched up in London in 1907, living in a Jubilee Street tenement flat – the future home of Golda Berk.
By 1910, Iosif was back in Russia where, like many of the Communists, he adopted a nickname – ‘Stalin’, ‘The Steel One’. It was another seven years before the Tsar was finally overthrown in the October Revolution. Then Stalin’s swift and bloody ascent to absolute control of the Soviet Union began.
Stalin the ruthless dictator
He ruthlessly suppressed dissent, murdered his rivals and resettled peasants thousands of miles from their homes. Stalin’s triumph was to halt the march of Hitler’s armies, with his people’s resolute stand at the siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad.
After the war, Stalin became increasingly paranoid and physically weak. In 1953, he looked to be plotting another purge of Moscow’s Jewish doctors. But it was to be the last emergence of the anti-semitism that surfaced throughout his life. The dictator died suddenly on March 5, 1953.
Stalin’s home in Whitechapel
Nearly half a century later, Golda ‘Goldie’ Berk has long since moved to a new flat in Waterview House, near Mile End Park. The Jubilee Street tenement which once had such a famous resident has long been demolished. “Good riddance,” says Goldie. “It was damp and horrible!”
But her thoughts often go back to that March morning years ago when, for a few days, the eyes of the world’s media turned to her Stepney home.