Four Decades Later, Fearsome Image of Josef Stalin Still Haunts Russia : History: Ethnic peoples that dictator pulled together through force, terror and mass deportations are now trying to reclaim old lands and settle old scores.

For more than 12 hours, the dictator lay crumpled on the floor of the darkened dining room in his pajamas, unable to move or cry for help, a copy of Pravda beside him and a bottle of mineral water on the table above. There was a look of horror in his eyes when servants finally found him.

Josef Stalin, hailed as the genius of the nation, the father of the homeland and the immortal genius, was dying of a brain hemorrhage.

The shocked Soviet people sat by their radios waiting for word about the man who had ruled their lives for three decades and who, unknown to them, now lay hostage to the cruel system he created.

Forty years after his death on March 5, 1953, Russians are torn about the man who sent millions to their deaths and bullied his backward country into becoming a superpower.

For the former Soviet Union, Stalin is an open wound. Ethnic peoples that he pulled together through force, terror and mass deportations now try to reclaim old lands and settle old scores through warfare that has killed thousands since the federation came apart in 1991.

Stalin’s final hours at his dacha outside Moscow were a fitting testament to his tyranny. No one knew that he had been stricken because his terrified servants dared not enter his chambers uninvited. His usual doctors were in prison and his Communist colleagues initially insisted that their comatose, 73-year-old leader was merely sleeping soundly.

His countrymen were overcome with grief when Moscow radio finally announced: “The heart of Lenin’s comrade-in-arms . . . has ceased to beat.” Thirty-gun salutes boomed in the capitals of the republics he had yoked together and ruled for a generation.

Millions of mourners filled the streets of cities across the nation. Hundreds of Muscovites were crushed to death in the funeral hysteria. Many people worried whether his death had left the Soviet Union easy prey for the West.

“When I heard about Stalin’s death, I immediately thought the country would fall apart; I believed it,” said Yuri Russky, a 66-year-old veteran of World War II. “I think it was mentioned that Stalin himself said once: ‘After I die, they will seize you like kittens.’ ”

Stalin’s grandson, Alexander Burdonsky, was taken as an 11-year-old to Moscow’s Hall of Columns, where the body lay in state.

“I felt no sorrow, but fear probably--fear and bewilderment that so many people were in the Hall--and all were crying,” Burdonsky said in an interview. “I didn’t cry. In fact, I couldn’t press a tear out of my eyes, which added to my fear and bewilderment.”

For the heirs to Stalin’s power, there was more relief than grief that his reign of terror was over.

After a time, they quietly began to stamp out his “cult of personality.” They stripped Stalin’s name from factories, ships, cities, farms and streets, and pulled down monuments throughout the land. On Oct. 31, 1961, they removed his body from the Red Square mausoleum he had shared with Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin and buried it nearby along the Kremlin wall.

De-Stalinization stalled under Leonid I. Brezhnev, whose regime pointed with pride to Stalin’s accomplishments: The forging of the Soviet empire, victory over Nazi Germany, mass industrialization and development of the atomic bomb. There was no talk of the estimated 21 million people who died in the purges, forced famine and labor camps that formed the gulag.

Anniversaries of his death were observed quietly, with few daring to say anything about him--except in his native Georgia, where Stalin’s memory was often praised.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev renewed the rehabilitations of Stalin’s victims that were begun by Nikita S. Khrushchev and declared that the dictator had perverted the ideas of Lenin.

Bringing up the dictator’s name in public now stirs the same kind of passion that was felt in the United States about Vietnam in the 1960s. Everyone has an opinion.

A near-riot broke out when Grigory Ivanov, a 78-year-old veteran standing on crutches outside the Lenin Museum, said to a Western reporter: “I didn’t believe Stalin, even before the war.”

“Who were you not to believe him?” screamed two old women, shoving toward Ivanov as an increasingly hostile crowd spilled off the sidewalk. “The Germans should have killed you! You traitor! Traitor! You brainless traitor!”

Many Russians, bewildered by the dizzying changes and chaos since the Soviet Union collapsed, long for a strong leader in Stalin’s mold--someone to fix the economy, fight crime and stop ethnic violence.

Day by day, hard-liners seem to gain strength at the expense of reformers led by President Boris Yeltsin. Hand-held portraits of Stalin were prominent at an anti-Yeltsin rally of more than 10,000 Muscovites.

“The 40th anniversary of Stalin’s death reminds us quite vividly that Stalin is still with us,” said Yeltsin’s military adviser, retired Gen. Dmitry Volkogonov.

“We must be vigilant. Nationalists and pseudopatriots and Communists, who are now becoming united, represent a great threat to our country. And I don’t exclude the possibility of a reign of terror.”

Volkogonov, a historian who dug through the dictator’s secret archives and wrote a critical biography, said Stalin “has a lot of supporters, and their numbers are growing.”

Another historian, former dissident Roy Medvedev, said Stalin has been seized upon by those he calls National Communists “as a symbol, an idol, a myth.”

“He has died once and is now being revived in a different image,” Medvedev said. “In the consciousness of young people today, Stalin is absolutely different from what he was in reality.

“Many young people do not know who Stalin was, what he did, what crimes he committed in our country, what great damage he did to our people. They say: ‘Stalin maintained order and discipline. Under Stalin, the crime rate was lower. We had low prices, we were a superpower under Stalin. And now, we are destroyed and we are just beggars.’ ”

Nina Andreyeva, a St. Petersburg chemistry professor and leading Stalinist, said his image is recovering.

“The farther we move from the past, the more significant and grand his figure becomes,” she said. “Despite all the mendacious propaganda, despite the hysteria spread by mercenary newspapers, and especially by our bourgeois TV . . . the personality of Stalin attracts more and more people.”

Burdonsky, now a theater director, said he still grapples with how to regard his grandfather.

“There are many reasons to say Stalin was great, and just as many reasons to say he was vile,” Burdonsky said. “Maybe he was a genius, an evil genius. . . . This, I can’t love.”