Reaction of Vasiliy Stalin
The crash occurred two and a half weeks after the 70th birthday of Joseph Stalin. Stalin's son Vasily Dzhugashvili, an Air Force commander of the Moscow Military District and the patron of the ice hockey team, was afraid of his father's possible reaction and of the crash investigation; he decided to recruit a new Air Force team in less than a day, except for three original players (including the later IIHF Hall of Fame member Vsevolod Bobrov) who for various reasons were not on the crashed plane. The crash was not mentioned in the state-controlled media, and Joseph Stalin allegedly never even knew it had happened.
Read more about this topic: 1950 Sverdlovsk Air Disaster
Famous quotes containing the words reaction and/or stalin:
“In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)