Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited
the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off
Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had
only friendly intentions. Putin spoke harshly that day of the
notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had
signed with Adolf Hitler — an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi
occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics — calling it a
"collusion to solve one's problems at others' expense."
But Putin's view of history appears to have undergone
a startling transformation. Last month, the Russian leader praised the 1939
nonaggression accord with Hitler as a clever maneuver that forestalled war with
Germany. Stalin's 29-year reign, generally seen by Russians in recent years as
a dark and bloody chapter in the nation's history, has lately been applauded by
Putin and his supporters as the foundation on which the great Soviet superpower
was built. Across a resurgent Russia, Stalin lives
again, at least in the minds and hearts of Russian nationalists who see Putin
as heir to the former dictator's model of iron-fisted rule. Recent tributes
celebrate Stalin's military command acumen and geopolitical prowess. His ruthless
repression of enemies, real and imagined, has been brushed aside by today's
Kremlin leader as the cost to be paid for defeating the Nazis. As Putin has sought to recover territory
lost in the 1991 Soviet breakup, his Stalinesque claim to a right to a
"sphere of influence" has allowed him to legitimize the seizure of
Crimea from Ukraine and declare an obligation to defend Russians and Russian
speakers beyond his nation's borders.
On May 9, the 70th anniversary of the Allied war
victory was marked and Stalin's image was put on display with glorifying war
films, T-shirts, billboards and posters. Framed portraits of the mustachioed
generalissimo were carried by marchers in Red Square's Victory Day parade and
in the million-strong civic procession that followed to honor all who fell in
what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Putin's embrace of Stalin's power-play
tactics is applauded by many Russians and other former Soviet citizens as the
sort of decisive leadership they longed for while watching communism collapse
around them. To the proponents of a reinvigorated Russia, reformist Mikhail
Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, are seen as having submitted Russia
to Western domination.
Stalin "kept us all together, there was a
friendship of nations, and without him everything fell apart," said Suliko
Megrelidze, a 79-year-old native of Stalin's Georgian birthplace who sells
dried fruit and spices at a farmers market. "We need someone like him if
we want peace and freedom from those fascists in Europe and America." Such sentiments are no longer confined
to those with actual memories of the Stalin era. A poll this spring by the
independent Levada Center found 39% of respondents had a positive opinion of
Stalin. As to the millions killed, 45% of those surveyed agreed that the deaths
could be justified for the greater accomplishments of winning the war, building
modern industries and growing to eventually give their U.S. nemesis a battle
for supremacy in the arms race and conquering outer space.
Stalin's standing among his countrymen has waxed and
waned with the political upheavals that have wracked the Soviet Union and
Russia. He was so dominant a figure in Soviet citizens' lives by the time of
his death on March 5, 1953, that hundreds of thousands poured into the streets
of Moscow in a chaotic outbreak of mourning when word of his passing reached a
public taught to believe that life was impossible without Stalin — the
Bolshevik nom de guerre he adopted, signifying "man of steel." Nikita Khrushchev, who finally prevailed in attaining
the leadership after five years of Kremlin infighting, began a campaign of
de-Stalinization in 1961, moving Stalin's embalmed remains from public display
next to Vladimir Lenin's to a less prominent grave near the Kremlin wall.
Stalingrad, the hero city that symbolized the Soviets' watershed battle to turn
back the Nazis, was renamed Volgograd, and statues and busts were removed, and
streets, institutes and schools were renamed. But the erasure of Stalin's name and likeness served
also to stifle discussion of his vast crimes: Siberian exile or death sentences
for political opponents, collectivization of agriculture during which millions
starved, deportation of minorities and property seizures that impoverished
generations. It wasn't until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that a candid
recounting of his era was attempted. Even Putin, earlier in his presidency, fell in line with the collective spirit
of criticism of Stalin's errors.
During the visit to Poland in 2009, a year
after he had sent troops to seize territory in sovereign Georgia, Putin
appeared to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the nonaggression pact
that paved the way for war and division 70 years earlier was to be remembered
as immoral. The Aug. 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret
protocols doomed Poland to Nazi occupation a week later and gave the Baltic
states and parts of Finland and Romania to the Soviet Union. Millions of
citizens of those betrayed territories died at Stalin's hand, in political purges,
summary executions and slave labor camps. The scope of Stalin's brutality remains a topic of
heated debate. Late Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once claimed in an
interview that as many as 110 million died from the dictator's vast array of
repressions between 1921 and 1959, including prisoners who succumbed long after
Stalin's reign. Historian Viktor Zemkov, at the other extreme, puts the number
of deaths attributable to Stalin at 1.4 million. "The estimates of 110 million to 1.4 million speak for themselves — a
hundredfold disagreement," said Dmitry Lyskov, a state television
talk-show host who mounted a failed campaign four years ago to put Stalin's
visage on city buses to commemorate Victory Day. The Russian Military-Historical Society, established
by Putin in 2012, announced this year that a new Stalin museum was to open in
May in the village of Khoroshevo, 140 miles northeast of Moscow. Stalin spent
the night of Aug. 4, 1943, in a small wooden home there, the closest he came to
visiting frontline Soviet troops during the four-year fight to defeat Germany. The sanitized exhibits recounting
Stalin's contributions to the war effort and postwar recovery were ready by the
planned May 9 holiday. But the opening was postponed amid local opposition led
by the Tver regional leader of Memorial, a group dedicated to shedding light on
Russia's totalitarian era. Yan Rachinsky, a leader of Memorial's
Moscow chapter, calls the museum "ridiculous," and Stalin's single
night there irrelevant to the war victory two years later.
The stillborn museum was one of several official
efforts to honor Stalin this year: A statue was erected in the southern city of
Lipetsk, and splashed with red paint the night it was unveiled. A bronze
likeness of the dictator was put up to mark the February anniversary of his
1945 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President
Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, a Black Sea resort now inaccessible to most of
the world as only Russian aviation serves the contested Crimean peninsula. Stalin has weathered more than six
decades of historical revisions to maintain his standing as a rival to the
West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin," said
Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in Stalin's
political purges. "Just as Stalin defeated the West
70 years ago by capturing half of Europe," Svanidze said, "we are
defeating the West again today. Crimea is our Berlin, our Reichstag, and there
is no way it will be restored to Ukraine in the foreseeable future."
Svanidze also predicts there will be
no more credible elections as long as Putin chooses to stay in power. That, he
said, is another parallel with Stalin's lifetime sinecure as Soviet leader.
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