(Adnkronos) – A statue of Stalin was inaugurated at the Taganskaya metro station in Moscow, not coincidentally on Victory Day last May 9th. It is a copy of a monument built in 1950 and removed during the de-Stalinization of the early sixties, renewed in the early nineties, with the brief opening of the archives and public debate on the crimes committed during the Stalinist or Soviet era. Since Vladimir Putin has led the country, statues or busts in honor of Stalin have proliferated, more and more every year, with more than one hundred new installations in different cities or villages in remote areas of the country where the project is even initiated by local residents.
School textbooks published in the last ten years present Stalin as an increasingly positive figure, emphasizing his role in the USSR’s victory over Nazi Germany and remaining silent about the repressions. The cult of the Great Patriotic War that Putin has strengthened is accompanied by the more implicit one of a return to the cult of Stalin’s personality. During the days of the Victory anniversary celebrations, Volgograd is renamed Stalingrad. A toponymy extended this year also to the airport, “Stalingrad” from 8 to 10 May, whereas the Soviets, until the eighties, referred to the battle of Stalingrad, which constituted a turning point in the war, as “Battle on the Volga”.
Calendars, miniature busts dedicated to Stalin are on sale in souvenir kiosks, bookstores and shops in Moscow. Memes with Stalin mocking the West are proliferating on cell phones.
Research by Ukrainian sociologists quoted by the Moscow Times indicated in 2023 that 63 percent of Russians, including almost half, 48 percent, of Russians aged between 18 and 24, had a positive opinion of Stalin. Even in the face of isolated episodes of protest, despite the ongoing repression against freedom of expression, as in 2022 when the installation of a mosaic of Stalin and Putin depicted as great military leaders was blocked by the authorities.
Putin refers to Stalin in two different ways, as an example of wise leadership, whose harsh pragmatism made it possible for him to send millions of Soviets to die for the good of the country in the Great Patriotic War, and as the creator of the “artificial” entity of Ukraine. But there is never any mention of the repressions. On the contrary, the Russian President has repeatedly said that he wants to remember them but in an aseptic way, without names, dates, places. Putin, like Stalin, understands and takes the best path for the country, to achieve victory against enemies. The more statues there are around to remind him, the more Russians will be led to think that the country needs a tough, pragmatic and patriarchal figure in power again.
