Why the cult of Josef Stalin is flourishing
It was an unusually cold March, even by Russian standards. After Joseph Stalin’s sudden death from a hemorrhagic stroke aged 74, four days of national mourning were declared before his state funeral on 9 March 1953.
Despite the bitter cold, the population gathered in long lines to pay homage to the sole ruler and dictator of the giant Soviet Union. So many people wanted to see the body of the “Father of Nations”, as the Soviet press referred to him at the time, that hundreds of people were crushed to death on the day of the funeral.
It took the Soviet leadership several years to distance itself from the “cult of Stalin’s personality” and it wasn’t until the 1960s that it was first publicly declared who he really was: a mass murderer.
Born Iosif Dzhugashvili in Georgia, the professional revolutionary, whose pseudonym means “the one of steel”, was the de facto ruler of the Soviet Union in 1923.
According to historians’ estimates, up to 40 million people fell victim to Stalin’s terror during his three-decade rule. They were executed, sent to forced labor camps, or starved to death due to the famine he had planned. There were mass deportations, and members of the intelligentsia—leading writers, poets, actors, scientists, directors—were denounced as “enemies of the people,” tortured, or killed.
From de-Stalinization to neo-Stalinism
“It may sound strange, but Stalin’s death is my first conscious childhood memory,” Irina Sherbakova told DW. The co-founder of the Human Rights Memorial organization received the Nobel Peace Prize at the end of 2022.
“I was a baby at the time, in 1953, but I remember Stalin’s death well,” says the 72-year-old historian. “I realized in a childish way, especially the weather: how the icy cold and fear – the last months of the Stalinist era were very oppressive, very depressing – became an expectation of spring.”
And spring really followed, when the Soviet authorities uniformly condemned the tyrant a few years later and began a process of de-Stalinization.
The dictator’s embalmed body, initially laid next to Lenin’s in a mausoleum on Red Square in central Moscow, was removed from public view and buried outside the Kremlin walls in 1961.
Countless monuments and busts of Stalin in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries, previously an integral part of the urban landscape, were destroyed on a massive scale – melted down, buried or dumped in rivers.
The Khrushchev thaw period of the 1960s changed the country forever, laying the groundwork for perestroika political reforms 20 years later.
Created in 1989, Memorial was an international network of human rights organizations whose main focus was addressing the impact of Stalin’s terror. But it was closed by Russia in 2021.
Greetings from Putin’s Russia: Stalin Strikes Back
For a long time, the revival of a Stalin cult seemed unthinkable. But a trend in that direction “started around 2014, with the annexation of Crimea,” according to Russian cultural journalist and writer Irina Rastorgueva, who, like Sherbakova, now lives in Berlin.
Rastorgueva told DW that in the 1990s and 2000s there were already attempts to erect monuments or busts of Stalin, especially in the provinces or at Stalin’s birthplace Gori in Georgia. His colleagues working on the Russian-language Wikipedia keep detailed records of all neo-Stalinist monuments.
She says it evolved from individuals placing busts of Stalin in their allotment gardens to monuments being erected in front of Communist Party headquarters. But what’s happening now doesn’t compare, observes Rastorgueva: The Russian state itself is opening new monuments to Stalin in the center of big cities.
The last monument to Stalin was unveiled on February 1, 2023, in the city of Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad.
The mayor of Volgograd stated at the inauguration ceremony that “certain countries want to erase the memory of the great victory of the Soviet army today”, but would not allow this to happen.
For the anniversary event, Volgograd was renamed Stalingrad for a day. “They could have directly renamed the city Putingrad,” says Rastorgueva wryly. The monument represents the current paradigm of how authorities are “interpreting history from above,” she adds.
Putin is trying to rehabilitate the dictator as the leader who fought the Nazis and turned the Soviet Union into a major world power.
“Victory in the Second World War is the last unifying denominator, the last trump card of Russian propaganda,” explains Rastorgueva.
Amidst war losses in Ukraine, it becomes all the more important for Moscow to promote the idea that, like Stalin in 1945, Putin is the one to lead the country to victory, she adds.
Source: DW
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