'The best master of the country': a Stalin Center is being built in Russia, publicly rehabilitating the dictator

Several dozen people gathered at the new monument to Joseph Stalin in the provincial town of Bor in central Russia, says NBC News.

Photo: Shutterstock

Admirers praised the late Soviet dictator, and event organizers laid a concrete cornerstone to celebrate what would become a Stalin center, museum, and educational center, giving a positive outlook on the creator of the Gulag and architect of mass repression in mid-XNUMXth century Russia.

“Stalin was the best master of the country. He won the war and rebuilt the country from ruins,” Alexei Zorov, 44, a local businessman who backed the new center, told NBC News.

The public rehabilitation of Stalin's image reflects the social and political tensions that have gripped Russia in recent months. For some, the memory of Stalin suggests an era of national greatness, and President Vladimir Putin promoted Stalin's image as a way to deflect criticism of his leadership as he struggles with declining approval ratings, a sluggish economy, and allegations of corruption.

For others, however, Stalin personifies an era of fear and repression that seems all too familiar in Russia today. The Putin government has cracked down on pro-democracy protesters and thousands of people took to the streets in support of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Zorov was 18 years old when he joined the Communist Party, which still enjoys strong local support. The Stalin Center reminded government officials that “they must fight corruption at the top,” he said.

Under Stalin, about 1,7 million Soviet citizens were evicted from their homes and sent to forced labor camps. About 690 people were executed. However, in recent years, statues have been erected throughout the country dedicated to this man as a national hero who defeated the Nazis and led the era of modernization.

Opinion polls by the Levada Center, an independent organization based in Moscow, found that about 70 percent of Russians approve of Stalin and his policies.

This came as a shock to some Russians.

“I spent my whole life destroying Stalin’s totalitarian system, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, the core of the Russian elite,” said Valery Borshchev, a former Soviet dissident who is now a human rights activist with the Russian human rights organization Moscow Helsinki Group.

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Borshchev believes that while maintaining the image of Stalin as a hero to the Russian people, Putin, a KGB veteran and former head of the FSB, is working to restore the KGB's image and weaken criticism of his own suppression of political dissent.

“Putin is pragmatic. He knows that Stalin was an executioner, but he needs him now to save his political career,” Borshchev said.

Such efforts go beyond the image of Stalin. The Moscow prosecutor's office recently announced that the dismantling of the monument to the chief of Soviet intelligence Felix Dzerzhinsky was illegal. The statue stood in front of the FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square, but was demolished in 1991. Now she can be resurrected in the place where she once stood.

For Putin's opponents, such monuments from an era of brutal repression and massive surveillance symbolize the danger and state-sanctioned violence they face today.

In recent weeks, police have raided the offices and homes of Navalny's supporters.

Four editors of the Moscow student newspaper DOXA are now facing up to three years in prison for "inciting" minors to participate in anti-government protests that erupted last winter in more than 100 Russian cities.

Some organizers of rallies in support of Navalny fled the country. Many of those who remain are now facing legal action.

The Moscow prosecutor's office is also seeking the dissolution of Navalny's nongovernmental group in accordance with the anti-extremism law. And in prison, Navalny went on a three-week hunger strike, which, according to his personal doctor, almost led to his death.

In Bor, 26-year-old lawyer Oleg Rodin heads the local branch of Yabloko, Russia's only registered liberal party. According to him, the current generation of political dissidents is going through hard times in the face of repression, and Stalin's rehabilitation highlighted the need for Putin's opponents to run for office themselves. Rodin said he plans to push for elections to the State Duma in September.

“The return of Stalinism is terrible,” he said. But most Stalinists are older, he noted, and it is the younger generation that represents “the future of Russia.”

On the subject: 'Admiration and Respect': Russians approve of Stalin’s all-time high

Nonetheless, while Putin may be encouraging the restoration of Stalin's image to increase support for his own leadership, some of Stalin's supporters today also openly criticize Putin.

In Bor, with flags of Stalin fluttering in the wind, speakers ridiculed today's Kremlin as weak and subservient to Russia's enemies, characterizing Putin's tough foreign policy as insufficiently confrontational towards Western powers and criticizing him for the country's current economic woes.

Putin is an “acrobat” who is trying to appease the conservative electorate by showing sympathy for his predecessor, said Albert Karakhanyan, an activist in the local anarchist movement. Boris Yeltsin oversaw Russia's transition from a communist system after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he added.

“Our creeping economic growth is a shame! Our population decreased by 670 thousand people last year. Five thousand enterprises have closed in our region,” said Vladislav Egorov, first secretary of the local branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

The oil-dependent economy went into recession during the Covid-19 pandemic last year, and millions of Russians fell below the poverty line.

Egorov also gave examples of how Russia was ignored in the international arena.

“They kicked us out of Prague,” he said, referring to the Czech Republic's recent decision send dozens of Russian diplomats after its intelligence service reported that the Kremlin was behind the deadly 2014 bombing of a Czech ammunition depot. “Stalin would never have allowed this.”

“Stalin, wake up!” - an old man shouted in the crowd, as if addressing a statue.

Zorov, the center's sponsor, was equally critical.

“Putin is lagging behind,” he told NBC News. “Our authorities are afraid even of the dead Stalin. All they can do is rob people."

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In the current political climate in Russia, such criticism of Putin often leads to arrests. But at the ceremony at the Stalin Center, only one person was detained: Andrei Sorochkin, a local liberal opposition activist, who staged a protest at the event, holding up a banner pointing out Stalin's atrocities.

“Only a moral monster could worship such a monster,” the poster said.

The police later released Sorochkin after a brief interrogation. According to him, this was the 10th time he was taken into custody in the last couple of years. In his opinion, the connection between the present moment and the previous era of political repression is obvious.

“The police grab all the protesters, sentence them to prison for reposting on social networks, and now the Russian authorities are banning Navalny’s movement as extremist,” he said.

Even without statues praising Stalin, it seemed to him that the notorious leader had already returned. According to him, under Putin, he seemed to have witnessed the "reincarnation of a bloody dictator."

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