The rehabilitation of Stalin

By JAY AKBAR 

Putin rewrites history to convince almost half of all Russians that megalomaniac dictator was just a man with 'good intentions'.

Russian people's attitude towards Joseph Stalin - the former Soviet Union leader who was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people - is becoming increasingly positive, according to a revealing new poll.

And a leading historian says the country's leaders have been promoting the war tyrant as a 'tough leader' who guided the Soviets to victory in the Second World War and presided over the country's industrialisation.

Now new evidence suggests that suggests 'Stalin's rehabilitation is being steadily implemented', a leading historian has said.

One rights group which specialises in Stalin-era victims believes that during his regime, ten million people died of starvation, more than five million were displaced and six to seven million were arrested for political reasons.

Nikita Petrov from Russia's most prominent rights organisation Memorial says it is 'a sign of unlearned history lessons'.

He added that it comes from 'a reluctance to look at yourself and honestly admit that we took the wrong path and that our country committed a host of crimes against its own people and the people of neighbouring states'.

Petrov says this sentiment which stems from the country's leaders - who long for the days when the USSR were a world superpower - has filtered down to many everyday Russians.

Now 45 per cent of people believe 'sacrifices' sustained by people under Stalin were justified by the country's great goals, according to a study by the respected Levada Centre pollster.

That number is up from 27 per cent in October 2008 while the number of people who viewed Stalin negatively fell to 20 per cent from 43 per cent in 2001. 

Putin has been ambivalent about the role of Stalin, condemning the 'ugliness' of state-sponsored terror but also saying his regime should not be compared to that of Nazi Germany.

'The Stalin regime never aimed to exterminate entire ethnic groups,' the Russian president said during his televised phone-in last month.

Since President Vladimir Putin took power in 2000, there has been a growing chorus of Russians who take a positive view of the Soviet tyrant's role in history.

Those attitudes have changed so dramatically on the back of patriotic fervour whipped up by state-controlled media that some analysts speak of a creeping 'rehabilitation of Stalin'.

The change in how Russians perceive the Soviet leader came into focus in the run-up to Russia's celebrations of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in WWII.

Banners featuring Stalin - whose name is inseparably tied to the history of the conflict known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War - were spotted in Moscow and Magadan, a former transit point in a vast network of Stalinist labour camps.

The precise number of deaths caused by the Stalin regime remains a subject of debate but according to Memorial rights group, about ten million people died of starvation, more than five million were displaced, and about six to seven million were arrested for political reasons.

But law student Mikhail Kosyrev - who used to have a negative view of Stalin - says his attitude has drastically changed in recent years and insists that he meant well.

The 29-year-old said: 'Over the past five years I've often watched documentary films about Stalin, about that time on television and learnt more about him. 

'And now I don't have any negative feelings towards him. He had good intentions.'

Many analysts warn that unless Russians get the Stalin cult out of their system history may repeat itself.

The Gazeta online newspaper wrote: 'As long as history in Russia is presented as a chain of triumphs and victories over enemies, without an honest attitude towards our forefathers' mistakes and crimes, we will have no safeguards against a repeat of the purges.'

But law student Kosyrev appears unconvinced. He says that like Putin, who is locked in a battle of wills with the West, Stalin was also guided by the interests of his country.

'I see what is happening in Ukraine, how America is putting pressure on us over Ukraine and I think things back then were not easier and there was no other way for him.'

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