Putin rehabilitates Stalin to legitimize aggression against Ukraine

MoscowThe final straw was the recent re-inauguration of a high relief of Joseph Stalin in a central Moscow metro station. In the late 1950s, during de-Stalinization, the sculpture, dedicated to Victory in World War II, was modified to erase the figure of the dictator, and in 1966 it was finally lost during renovation work. Now, however, metro officials want to recover it as a "gift to passengers" on the ninetieth anniversary of the urban railway.

Art experts have denounced it as an aberration from a restoration perspective and that it could be "a piece of plastic poorly made with a 3D printer." The intention is, therefore, purely ideological. In the early days, nostalgic communists even left flowers, but some also appeared there. wreaths in memory of Stalinist repressionIn the 1930s, nearly a million people were executed, between three and five million died of starvation in Ukraine due to the communist government's agrarian policies, millions more suffered the same fate in the gulag labor camps, and hundreds of thousands were deported.

The most ingenious protest was led by two activists, who attached, among other messages, a piece of paper with a 2009 quote from Vladimir Putin: "Achieving results through repression is unacceptable. During that period [Stalin's rule] we not only confronted the masses in the face of counteraction, but also personally confronted our own people." Both were tried and fined.

Far from being an anecdote, this controversy indicates a trend. In Russia, there are at least 120 monuments dedicated to the dictator, according to estimates by the independent media outlet Mógem Obiàsnit (We Can Explain). Of these, 105 were erected during Putin's presidency, and the majority after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev had virtually all positive representations removed, and in the 1990s, the Soviet era. However, especially in the last decade, there has been a slow but steady restoration of his legacy. Very skillfully, the authorities have not pushed for the construction of new monuments, but have allowed them to be erected privately. Moreover, in school textbooks—edited by the Russian negotiator with Ukraine Vladimir Medinsky—Stalin has been portrayed as a person beloved by the people who did everything to win the Great Patriotic War.

As Ian Garner, assistant professor at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw and a specialist in Russian propaganda, explains to ARA, we are witnessing "a very conscious strategy on behalf of the regime not only to rehabilitate its image, but to make it central to Russian political culture." The cult of the dictator goes hand in hand with the Putinist cult of World War II, which was fundamental in legitimizing the aggression against Ukraine.

The years of Stalinist terror fade, becoming dwarfed by the great feat achieved by Stalin in defeating Nazism and saving the Soviet people. "Yes, there wassome errors"But the main thing is that we won the war," Aleksei Makarov, spokesman for Memorial, a Russian organization that preserves the memory of Stalinist repression, quipped in an interview with ARA. According to him, people today see Stalin as "a symbol of a strong hand, of order" and yearn for a past in which Russia was a great country.

In several surveys conducted in 2023, in the midst of the war, 63% of Russians positively evaluated him, compared to just 20% 10 years earlier. Even among those under 25, the acceptance rate had risen to 48%. Part of this success among younger people has to do with a "memization" of Stalin's image. Garner recalls that, eight or nine years ago, stickers and montages of him began circulating online, which are still popular today, portraying him as "fatherly, masculine, powerful."

From his perspective, the goal of this seemingly organic, but carefully orchestrated rehabilitation from the Kremlin, is to equate Putin with Stalin and other Russian historical figures such as Peter I, Catherine the Great, and Ivan the Terrible. In this way, the Russian president enters history as a leader who is "incredibly decisive, with privileged vision, who must be trusted, who makes sacrifices, and who will ultimately achieve victory in a great war."

Just as it would have been a scandal a few years ago if Volgograd Airport were renamed Stalingrad, and is now about to happen, the Stalin relief at Taganskaya station is now part of the everyday landscape. Those who pass by every day are probably unaware that, according to Memorial, the dictator had more than 750 builders and workers of the Moscow Metro killed, including its first director.