The other day, Moscow authorities unveiled a life-sized bas-relief panel of Stalin in one of the central tube stations. The panel is a replica of the original sculpture, People’s Gratitude to the Leader and Commander, destroyed in 1966 during the destalinisation campaign.
According to Marx, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”. Be that as it may, but my own history has indeed come full circle.
My early childhood was overshadowed by Stalin, literally so on high holidays. We lived in the very centre of Moscow, where the Soviets developed a clever trick to remind us of true divinity.
They’d project a giant image of Stalin onto the cloud cover and every night illuminate it with floodlight beams. There he was, bigger than the biggest buildings in Gorky Street, brighter than the brightest star, overlooking his charges from high above, a deity sometimes wrathful, more rarely merciful, but always divine.
“How did they do that, Mummy?” “I don’t know, but isn’t he wonderful? We must all be thankful to him.”
Since I was only five when Stalin died, I was deemed too immature to offer the requisite gratitude, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood”. But I do remember feeling sad that I’d never see him alive. The mummified figurine lying next to Lenin in the Red Square Mausoleum wasn’t a satisfactory substitute.
Another three years, and history ended. Not in the way Francis Fukuyama so foolishly opined 40 years later, but in the sense that Stalin personified and encompassed Soviet past, present and future. Stalin was Soviet history, and in 1956 it was erased with him.
Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes (of which he himself was a major perpetrator) and Stalin’s personality cult (replacing it with his own). Overnight the landmarks signposting history began to disappear.
Stalin’s statues were being taken down and either destroyed or tucked away for future use. Places named after Stalin were being renamed, and even Stalingrad, né Tsaritsyn, became Volgograd. From now on, quipped Moscow wags, Stalin would be known as Joseph Volga.
When mummified Stalin was taken out of the Mausoleum, I was 14 and already an anti-Soviet vermin in the making. The destalinisation campaign was in full swing, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted the whole diabolical contrivance to bite the dust.
By the time it did, in 1991, I had been out of the Soviet Union for 18 years, happy to confirm the old adage that true beauty is best perceived from afar. A few more years, and that long-distance observation began to yield a curious phenomenon. Stalin was making a gradual comeback.
Prodded by Kremlin propaganda, more and more Russians began to hanker after the past, as embodied by Stalin. I wouldn’t call it nostalgia because neither they nor increasingly even their parents had lived under Stalin. It’s something deeper than that, the historical Russian craving for one strong hand on the tiller while the other one is cracking a whip.
Stalin’s redux gathered momentum and accelerated no end under Putin, who increasingly sees himself, and is seen by his flock, as Stalin Mark II. When reminded that Stalin murdered 60 million of his subjects, the new worshippers wave such petty gripes away.
He had to be as tough as the times dictated, they shrug. And anyway, that number is exaggerated. Khrushchev only owned up to 20 million. Oh well, that’s all right then. (The Russians are notoriously lackadaisical about keeping such statistics. If you wish to know how the number of 60 million was arrived at, I’d recommend Prof. Rummel’s books Lethal Politics and Murder by Government.)
Putin’s Stalinist propaganda glosses over the bloodiest reign in history, concentrating instead on the rabble-rousing ultra-patriotic message Putin sees as vital to his own reign. Statues and busts of Stalin, those presciently kept in storage for decades, are again going up all over Russia, to educate the populace in the martial spirit deemed essential at present.
Understandably, this process picked up after Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2014. At least 100 new statues have since adorned the Russian skyline, while Stalin is being glorified as an effective manager and, above all, the great military leader who won the Second World War singlehandedly.
The Russian Orthodox Church, whose hierarchy are bearded and cassocked KGB agents, is doing its bit. Stalin’s moustachioed visage now appears on numerous icons, reinforcing the message of divinity I remember from my early childhood. Blasphemy, what blasphemy? No such thing in a country gone rabid.
Quasi-serious Russian historians try to put forth various simulacra of sensible arguments. It’s wrong, they say, to rewrite history on the spur of the moment. Yes, Stalin was a bit rough at times, but above all we must recognise his achievements.
Anyway, didn’t Churchill say, “Stalin took Russia with horse and plough and left it with an atomic bomb”? Well, actually Churchill didn’t, even though various billboards around Russia claim he did. The phrase comes from the book Russia After Stalin by Isaac Deutscher, Stalin’s Marxist biographer.
The USSR did win the war with Stalin as Commander-in-Chief, continue those advocates, and they are even prepared to admit the Allies played some minor role in that victory. What they’d rather not admit is that Stalin started that war as Hitler’s ally, which he remained for two years, but then there are limits to people’s flexibility.
And yes, one has to agree with them that Stalin is a significant part of Russian history. And no, he shouldn’t be written out of history books, as he more or less was under Khrushchev. However, there exists a big difference between keeping Stalin in history books and putting him on hundreds of pedestals for the brainwashed population to worship.
Hitler, after all, was also part of German history, which fact is probably acknowledged by German historians. (The qualifier ‘probably’ refers to the tendency of woke modernity to expurgate historical figures it finds objectionable.) Yet one doesn’t see any statues of Hitler adorning Berlin or Vienna, with Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer etched on the pedestal.
Alas, what one does see in Vienna’s central Schwarzenbergplatz is a revolting Soviet War Memorial, densely covered with Stalin’s quotations about the Red Army bringing freedom to Europe. I hope that obscene eyesore, erected by the Austrian Communist Party during the Soviet occupation, will one day be removed.
However, tributes to Stalin will enjoy a long life in Russia, under Putin or his successors. That Georgian tyrant captured the essence of Russia, and the people will be eternally grateful – just as they are in that bas-relief.