Denis Nowell Pritt (D.N. Pritt) was a British barrister and had been a Labour Party member of Parliament in the 1930s. However, his true loyalty was to the Soviet Union and specifically to Joseph Stalin. The Anglo-Soviet Journal, as might be able to be guessed from its title, specialised in publishing pro-Soviet propaganda. Stalin died on March 5, 1953 and this must have been a sad day for Pritt and those associated with The Anglo-Soviet Journal. The honour of writing Stalin’s obituary was given to Pritt. It was published on pages 2-3 of the March 1953 issue. I copy below an extract from that obituary.

J.V STALIN

1879-1953

WHAT do members of the Society for Cultural Relations, with their particular interest in cultural developments in the USSR, and in cultural relations between the peoples of our two countries, owe to the great Joseph Stalin? His death is mourned, and his varied triumphs are gratefully praised, by hundreds of millions all over the world, from many aspects and for many reasons….

Others have thanked him for carrying the building of the Socialist state to the threshold of communism, for his great share in the military defeat of fascism, for the strength and richness he has brought to the prosperous, peace-loving new world. It is our special privilege to record with gratitude the new conception he has given to the world of the value of the human being, of the dignity of man, and of the wide cultural and educational development based on Socialist security….

So we say: Thank you, Joseph Stalin, for the cultural human development, for the conscious purposeful humanism that you have brought to the lives of all who have eyes to see, minds to understand, and hearts to rejoice. We and our fellow men have, of course, many, many more achievements than that for which to thank you; but for that alone our gratitude is so full that there can never be words enough to express it. We will thank you more truly with our deeds, by working for and helping to build, on the foundations you have taught us to understand, for ourselves and all others, a world of peace and growing culture.

While I only copied an extract, I can assure readers that in the remainder of the obituary there was no mention of the millions upon millions of deaths that occurred in the Soviet Union, the responsibility for which can be laid at Stalin’s door. In 1954, the year after this obituary was published, its author, D.N. Pritt, was awarded the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples.