State Duma deputies ask that Pushkin Museum director be investigated after she compared Stalin to Mickey Mouse

State Duma deputies from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have asked Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s federal Investigative Committee, to open a criminal case against Elizaveta Likhacheva, the director of the Pushkin Museum, regarding her remarks about Joseph Stalin.

On March 22, on air on television network RTVI, Likhacheva said that she views Stalin as a pop culture figure and expressed the opinion that he comes up in public discourse “whenever people need to be distracted from something serious.”

People sit and discuss Stalin’s death in full seriousness. Compatriots, have you gone totally nuts? There really isn’t anything else to discuss? Stalin has always been something like a marker for us. He’s a pop culture item to us, like Mickey Mouse. There are so many images of Stalin, and in the end, he is a pop culture figure. Whenever people need to be distracted from something serious and important, Stalin gets it.

Deputies Denis Parfenov, Sergey Obukhov, Mikhail Matveev, and Nina Ostanina, expressed the opinion that Likhacheva’s remarks fulfill “certain revanchist forces’ orders to distort history.” They said that the Pushkin Museum director’s words amount to the “rehabilitation of nazism” and hooliganism.

Elizaveta Likhacheva has been the director of the Pushkin Museum, a museum of European art in Moscow, since March 21, taking over the directorship from Marina Loshak.